219. The Contest Between Paintings and Wallpaper.

 

At each meal in my retirement home I face a wall that has a painting of wallpaper on it.  That's all that's in the frame.  Just a section of wallpaper.

Though it doesn't throw me into transports it does transport me: back to that train station (Post #2) where I immediately thought better of what some people were doing in a passageway when my companion told me that it was "performance art."

You can see what makes the connection between the station and the wall wall: a thing we look at is given added value through a name.  My companion said, "This is art," and so, I think, does the frame.

I argued that a painting shouldn't be given this added value.  It should earn it.  By competing fair and square with everything else offering value.  The performers in the train station are up against anything else you might see in a train station.  The stuff inside a frame is competing against anything you might see outside the frame.  Like the wallpaper.

Now what everything on the wall of a dining room is competing for is the privilege of supplying a background pleasure.  Conversation and food are the foreground pleasures.  You can find all kinds of weighty, paired terms for this division —intrinsic vs. extrinsic, essential vs. accidental, central vs. marginal — but none of them will let you reverse the privilege of the conversation and food.  They (a jazz club will tell it to you) are the trumpet and clarinet, carrying the tune; the wallpaper is just brushes on the drum.

Experience with various pleasures soon taught me, as Socrates taught me later, that for the good life pleasures have to be ranked, and proportioned, and located, foreground or background.  If you disagree I'll take you to a jazz club. 

OK, this retirement home is no jazz club, but the truth I landed on was a general one, applying everywhere.  So here I am, listening closely to my companions (don't think octogenarians aren't worth listening to), and what do I hear?  What has this painter done?  Cued the drummer to take over.  With his brush!  "Quiet, you diners, I'm showing you some art," says the frame.  I look inside.  "Ta da!"  A section of wallpaper.  Outside is inside, background is foreground, lesser is greater, and the effect on me is distraction.  I can no longer keep my mind on the conversation.

So what am I, in a comedy club?  "Hey, the wallpaper guy is here.  Thinks he can use it to test the value of painting." All right, smart-ass, test this.

I know, I'm so vain I think that song is about me, but still I can be useful. How familiar are you with the recent, and in some ways ongoing, culture wars?  Do you know that one side believed in proportion and the other side thought they believed too strongly in it?  The proportionists (also identified as traditionalists, and sometimes classicists) carefully distinguished essential from accidental, intrinsic from extrinsic, central from peripheral — and ranked the former ahead of the latter.  The anti-proportionists (identified as postmodernists) exercised less care and said, in effect, to hell with such ranking.  What traditionalists put in the center they — often playfully, just for a tweak — would put in the margin.

There you've got the retirement home dining room, foreseen by the postmodern painter.  She raises her decentering weapon, her brush, the wallpaper goes into the frame, and pow, there I am with my fork in the air.

Now I've taken enough of these shots (oh those 60s absurdists) to know that the worst thing I can do is go weighty on her.  The purpose, as with those ribbers Hemingway despised, is to get a rise out of you.  Not this time, baby.  I'll play it cool.

How do I do that?  By listening closely to the octogenarian trying to complete her promising thought.  I'll show the painter that, even though I'm internally enjoying her game, it ranks below the game we at the table are still trying to play, however well, the game of understanding life, and what's essentially good in it.  Through talk.  That's Socratic, that's classical, that's Western.  And that's what the postmodernist is turning away from — or having fun with.