155. Art at Home: Rules

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The first rule for painters, as for doctors, is "Do no harm."  Paintings do harm when they call attention to themselves without providing a reward equal to what they have interrupted, like a dinner-table conversation. 

You best discover the rewards of a painting when you look at it by yourself, after the party's over.  When you have a painting that your eyes go back to, and see new things, you know you've got a winner, and you can be glad you bought it. 

I don't know what makes a winner, exactly, but I do know that with me the winner is nearly always going to be a painting you can look into, one with several dimensions.  That stimulates me to imagine new angles, myself, and sort of get into the painting.  It's a pleasure.

Do I want to talk about it?  Not likely.  I don't have the words, and I doubt that my friends will have them either.  It's too mysterious, and you don't need them for the pleasure.

Winners belong in the living room, where your easy chair is and where, before the party, there's not likely to be much for conversation about paintings to interrupt.  In the dining room you want pleasant non-competitors, guests who never substitute their own topic for an ongoing topic — as Andy Warhol's can of Campbell's soup did. 

"Harmless paintings, harmless guests.  You need to justify such an unexciting prospect.  What exactly is it that you're protecting from harm?"

Well, if you can't guess it I doubt that I will be able to say it.  It would be easier if you were a follower of Socrates.  Then when I said, "I'm trying to protect the good life" you would see him trying to live well and you'd understand.  Living well meant speaking well.  The good life was a talking life.  It's an elusive thing but at a dinner table I think you have a better chance at it — seeing what it is, understanding it, contributing to it, enjoying it — than you do anyplace else.

"But aren't paintings part of the good life?  Don't they contribute to it?"

Oh, they do.  If an active imagination is part of the good life (and I feel sure it is when I sit in my easy chair moved to go further and further into a painting) then paintings and other works of art contribute to the good life.  They may make you a better contributor at the dinner table!  But contributions vary and you don't want a lesser one interfering with a greater one.  Conversation contributes more — has a chance of contributing more, anyway — than painting does.  So you put the disruptive painting in the living room.

"'Disruptive.'  I can imagine a conversation in which the Warhol painting would not be a disruption: a conversation about movements in painting."

That would be a specialist or professional conversation.  If your party is all art historians, OK.  If not, if it's amateurs, no go.  You don't want any painting that says, "Hey, look at me.  I'm making a statement about earlier paintings."  Or about any of those special subjects. really.  Socratic, dinner-table conversation is amateur conversation, its subject is life, and it's rude for professionals to interrupt it.  Or even, if they are painters, to speak loudly on their own.  A dining-room wall is no place for them to talk to each other.

"You call your people 'amateurs' but they sound to me like philosophers.  That makes them rather special, doesn't it?  And, excuse me, possibly dull?"

Agh, I've misled you.  Choice of words again.  I said "talk about life." "About" made you think of philosophers, standing above life."  If had said, "talk close to life" you could have thought of your neighbors, people in the middle of life, the life you live, and, like you, lovers of it, amateurs, interested in anything rising out of it.  Put them at a dinner table and the resulting conversation is the one I'm calling "amateur."

"And that's the conversation you don't want to interrupt.  So you put the Warhol painting in the living room.  With the rest of the paintings that call attention to themselves?"

Yes, but with Warhol you've still got the problem of reward.  Can you go into the painting later or did it say all it has to say the first time?  If further contemplation of the can label (or the dots, or the monochrome canvas, or any of scores of other such things) does nothing for you after the party, then you might as well get the painting out of the house.

"Into a museum, maybe?  Where it can at least illustrate a movement?  Or a gallery, where people who aren't so concerned about dinner parties can buy it?"

That would be fine.  In museums you can hear fascinating conversations — painters talking to each other, curators getting them together for talk, curators talking to each other, curators talking to society, and so much else that will interest you.  And you can see the paintings you'd like to have but can't afford.  In galleries you can see the value other people put on them — if you're interested in those values, and you want to take the time.

"Why wouldn't you be interested in those values and be willing to take the time?  Why wouldn't any educated person be interested in learning what our best-educated people think is the best in art?"

The question is not interest but degree of interest, measured against competing interests.  I can be interested in going to an exhibition to see if I've missed anything in a painter that others can show me and I can still stay home — if I'm more interested in what I've got going there.

"Like what?"

Like what can be found in any home: life, dealing with it, exploring it, enjoying it, the life of the imagination, the life of words, talk, parties, the talk of those up close to life, the wisdom of the dinner table.  Is anybody closer to life than a man and a woman, parents, talking babies at a dinner table?  Is anybody more capable of wisdom?  If you don't think so, why gamble on a trip across town to see what paintings or curators or dealers can tell you? 

"Or performers?"

Unless you mean "performers in a play," God yes.  Anybody willing to go three blocks to see what, if he had any imagination, he could see more significantly in his own neighborhood, all the great "happenings" there, just doesn't know how to economize.

"What is this, home economics?  Household management?"

No, it's life management.  Prioritizing.  Recognizing that life is short.  Seeing what's worth spending time on and what isn't.  Knowing what you value, what you need to protect.  Avoiding harm to it.

"And that's where your rule comes in.  You want artists to help?"

Yes.  Artists and curators and historians and anybody whose work is so fascinating it might distract people from this that they're pursuing, which, however they see it, Socrates would see as "the good life."

Note: This subject is also treated in Post #2, "Do We Need the Word 'Art'?"