a portrait of the irrelevant as a young antelope

"'Trying what?' cried Maury fiercely. '... Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas?'"

yep, that one made me think. (p.s. it's from The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

art seems kind of silly. every form of it, whether done in paint or clay or cursive or b major, is so inherently inaccurate. artists seem to look at life backwards. for life is made up of the tangible and concrete, the finite and structured, the solid, liquid, and gaseous. it isn't until a complicating human is introduced into the picture that things start being interpreted-- that ridiculous filter of mind through which every little noun is paraded and inspected for imagined meanings and hidden truths. the artistically inclined then endeavor to repeat the process in reverse order. their newly interpreted and nebulous understandings of life must now be made corporeal. the result is a warped conglomeration of the undeniable and the vulnerable: material things and the feelings they engender, respectively. but no matter how impractical and illogical art is, there still exists (either comfortably dormant or overworked to exhaustion) the desire natural to all humanity to produce it.

now that's not to say art isn't beautiful. oh no. i'm one of the more artistically appreciative (if not artistically skilled) folks out there. my point is that art is something that, ideally, should be kept apart from the ordinariness of life. (okay i know that's impossible, since what else have artists experienced than life? but shhh. that's why i said ideally.) art's incongruity with (or is it "to"?) the tangible world is hopelessly inevitable. for example. have you ever been listening to an exquisitely sculpted piece of music, which seems to carry your soul upon its sound, and then be told that it was written with the purpose of imitating a crowded street, of expressing an entire season, or of elegizing a mortal lover long buried? the comparison between that exalted tonal masterpiece and something so accessible seems laughable. it implies that an ordinary man who meandered through an ordinary existence among ordinary people tried to convey that largely uninteresting life through something undeniably beautiful. the beauty is still there, but the source is lost within. the effect is befuddling. indeed, the interpretation of a life through art seems to belittle the life itself.

but there's humanity for you.