Drinks With Doug

It's The Arts

Monday's weather: 60's and dry, partly sunny like September, and rather windy (like me.)
Monday's drink: Not having one, but if I were, I think I'd fancy a White Peach Bellini. Fizzylicious.
Monday's adage: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." (from Al Gore's 2008 commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University.)

This last weekend was chockablock with art in my hood. Art-O-Matic continues apace (C, D F and I will be going this coming Friday) and the now-empty jumpin' Jesus church that occupied a former garage at 14 and T has been converted into an 'edgy' downtowny-artist gallery that Transformer has occupied for the time. It was also Mid-City Artists' weekend whatnot to boot, with two of my neighbors exhibiting. I didn't get out to experience a single one of them, natch.

I did experience, side-note-wise, the new Harris Teeter store up at Kalorama and 18th, the one in the old roller rink. And I feel confident I can state for the record that it is the gayest grocery store, ever, in all of existence. Quite a statement I admit, but empirically true.

Back to art. The weekend, and the work of my friend J*who writes for The Art Newspaper set my mind to art recently. I've always had an uncomplicated relation with much of it. And generally speaking, I prefer more than less, perhaps mostly because I don't expect much from much of art. Not at least on our shared cultural level. The personal: well that's altogether another issue.

Art-O-Matic is a great example. Floor after floor of...what is that? Who did this? WHAT is that supposed to be? Lots of questions cast into the air for us to play with. The questions - the playfullness of it all - and not worrying about answering them is, for me, very stimulating. But then rarely I happen on something that is not playful at all. No predicting what it is or where I'll find it. But it's a something that...not that it demands attention, for I willingly give it. It's something that seeks somehow to come into me and fill me.

I know the language is a little fruity here, so let me try an analogy. Faith is a mutli-level experience for me. Most of it - the theological questions, the existential wandering, the poking about in that cloud of ideas apart from the quantifiable - is for me just fun. The more questions the better: I wish lots of people were asking lots more questions publicly, inviting the rest of us to trade answers back and forth, free from the weight of whether we're getting it right. Like those rainbow beach-balls that get popped from one to another at bad outdoor concerts. It just bumbles along, no direction, free from direction, existing just for us to bop it to someone else, something fun that we share and joins us together.

But then there's the personal layer. Wholly other than the diverting ponderments about abstractions, these are the deep questions of what my life's work is and should be, how I engage with those I love, and whether I allow my spirit - the spirit - to fill me as it should or if I fight it and keep it from its - and my - work. These are the rare moments I open to the fuzzy pink cloud of theology so that it can pour into me - to what end, who knows.

These are profound and scary moments, but at the essence of life. "Sitting with spirit," I refer to it with my shrink. So it is with art. There's a great jumbly mess of ART floating around in which I am perfectly comfortable moving through. It's just fun, and meant to be swatted up to someone else. But there are - rarely - works that I open to and try to come to live with as they fill me. Perhaps I'll share one or two of these in posts to come.

But not now. Life, Gordon Ramsey, and C all call me away from the dread blog. And none too soon.

*I have to give a shout-out to the work the J does, and the better thoughts he has on art that often don't make it to print. The Art biz - meaning the incredibly high-priced, stratospheric world "real" artists inhabit, opposed to those doing good work living down on this plane with us mortals - has become, I perceive, a sham: little else than oddities put out by no-talent ego cases with mendacious sales pitches, work that exists solely to be commoditized where "value" means exactly and only the price it fetches at auction. People who adopt the surface and trappings of real art before them but have nothing to say or, more charitably, little interest in conversing. I won't characterize J's thoughts on this, adding only when I say these things to him, he has a good chuckle. While you're at it, check out the Art Newspaper. Read it for a month, and write back what you learned about the arts world.