Collecting

I've always loved to look at paintings and sculpture. When I was a young man, 35 or 40 years ago, I first learned of the existence of some art collectors, and, angrily, I thought: those ********, they're just hoarding.

I was wrong. Over the years, I found out a lot more about those very same people. I found out how they promoted poor, unknown artists, gave their careers a boost. I learned how they brought publicity to artists who deserved more attention. I learned how in some cases they were bona fide art historians. I found out how they donated their collections to museums. I learned how there is this whole huge tradition of art collecting which is a good thing, and not hoarding at all. Over the course of centuries, art collecting has become a sort of career, which contributes a lot to the world.

 

That's art collecting. People collect all sorts of other things: comics, salt shakers, stamps, coins, Bibles, automobiles, dresses, etc, etc. Sometimes they know about the traditional art collecting and consciously are a part of that tradition of collecting. Other times they may not know anything about any of this stuff, but they have the same sorts of positive, productive, kind, morally good instincts which drive the best art collectors.

Dream Log: Art and Ohio State

I can remember a lot of my dreams since the coronavirus crisis started. Last night's dream was the first one where there was a pandemic in the dream.

I was in Columbus, Ohio, on the campus of the Ohio State University,

in order to attend a meeting intended to aid low-income people. However, the other people at the meeting would not respect social distancing from me, so I left before the meeting started, and wandered around the campus. On the way out of the meeting I found a key on the floor, but I didn't know what to do with it.

Social distancing was not being respected very much at all: for example, an Ohio State football game was about to get underway. I steered clear of the football crowd. On my way past them, I noticed a group of about twenty people in wheelchairs. A member of the Ohio State football team got behind each wheelchair, and together they ran, pushing the wheelchairs ahead of them, into the stadium. The crowd roared as soon as they got a sight of the speeding wheelchairs.

I walked through some campus buildings, looking at some library books which were not shelved in the main library. One book was a literary-and-visual-arts journal for Chilean expatriates. It was written in English, but everything was full of Chilean references which I did not get. I liked the illustrations, though, many of which were in a colorful sort of post-Matisse style.

Then an idiot neighbor of mine, several houses away, woke me up with a hammer and an electrical saw, making some stupid home-improvement stuff, just as he has been waking me up -- and quite a few others in the neighborhood, I'm sure -- very early most Sunday mornings for a long, long time. However, I fell asleep again very quickly, and in my dream, now I was both in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State, and simultaneously at home in Ann Arbor. And my neighbor was no longer a home-improvement boob oblivious to his neighbors and their sleep patterns, and was now instead an artist who used the hammer and saw to make works consisting of vertical rows of wooden panels about 15 inches square. An interesting thing about the panels was that they were decorated -- with paint, mostly -- in a very wide array of colors and styles. I made two fabric panels the same size as his wooden panels, one with a silkscreened image of an early-20th-century American politician, and the other very colorful,and hard-edged, very post-Ellsworth Kelly:

I offered these pieces of fabric to my neighbor, for him to add to the wooden artworks. He bought the one with the silkscreen image of the politician for $10, and passed on the colorful hard-edged piece.

Then I was back in Columbus. I met someone I knew decades ago when I lived in Columbus, and we sat in a huge deserted student union building outside of a shuttered cafe, talking. Suddenly the cafe's manager appeared, tossed me a bunch of keys on a ring and walked away. Just like with the key I'd found outside the meeting earlier, I had no idea what I should do with these keys. Then I woke up.

The Science-Humanities Split

Perhaps you've heard: STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics -- and the humanities -- art, literature, history, music, etc -- have split apart from one another.

Perhaps you've just read the previous sentence, and asked: Whaddya talkin' about, Steve? Was there some time when science and art actually got along?

Oh yes. The time was up until the eighteenth century, and can perhaps be seen most dramatically in Western civilization -- I really don't have much of a clue about non-Western civilizations, but I'm trying to catch up -- in the example of philosophy, and of individual philosophers. Up until a few centuries ago, the leading philosophers were also the leading mathematicians and scientists, and people generally took for granted that this was so. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz were the leading philosophers and the leading mathematicians of their time. Newton was a leading scientist and mathematician, but he left scarcely a mark in what today is generally considered to be philosophy. The split seems to be beginning already in Newton's time. Kant, Schopenahuer, Marx, Nietzsche and the other most prominent 19th-century philosophers are not, to my knowledge, enthusiastically read today by most scientists. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were prominent 20th-century mathematicians and philosophers, but they were very unusual in being both at the same time. In the 21st century, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse and Lawrence Krauss Tyson have said that philosophy is worthless, without causing much of an uproar among their fellow scientists, which shows you how little you can know about philosophy today and still be a brilliant scientist.

My brother, an engineer, goes probably even farther than Hawking and deGrasse Tyson and Krauss in his ignorant dismissal of philosophy -- and that's all this is: ignorance. If Hawking or deGrasse Tyson or Krauss or my brother knew very much at all about philosophy, they wouldn't say such things.

This unfortunate split, this destructive antagonism between two vital types of human endeavor is not, of course, all the fault of the scientists. Those who have objected to the dismissal philosophy by prominent scientists have included other prominent scientists. And it's certainly not as if all philosopher, artists, musicians, poets etc, have a decent appreciation of STEM. There is plenty of fault on both sides of the split.

I've tried to bring the sciences and the humanities back together, but I could've done much more. I stopped studying math in school just as soon as I was allowed to stop studying it, after completing 10th-grade geometry. I usually had the best math grades in my class -- the only exception I can remember was in 9th-grade algebra. The teacher posted a constantly-updated list of the members of the class by our current grade. I don't remember whether A was 90% and up, or 94% and up, or what exactly. I do remember that it was possible to score above 100% with extra-credit work, and that the 2 of us at the top of the list were over 100%, and that I wasn't on top. That felt very strange, not being the best math student in sight.

That 9th-grade algebra teacher, and some other math teachers I had, talked to me very excitedly about how far I would be able to go in math. They didn't realize that I didn't enjoy math at all. It was my undiagnosed autism which allowed me to make those grades without trying and without being interested.

The 9th grade was 45 years ago. Since then I've made a few feeble attempts to make more progress in math, which, it seems to me, would amount to developing an interest in and enjoyment of math. I was talking to a math teacher the other day, and he said, You have to enjoy math to go far in it.

My brother was valedictorian in high school and got 2 degrees from MIT. He enjoys math. During one of those periods when I was trying to develop an enjoyment, my brother gave me his copy of the 5th edition of Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney, one of his former MIT textbooks. He's a good brother, even though he is an appalling philistine when it comes to the arts.

Pages 355 through 362 of this book are missing. Did my brother remove these pages before giving me the book? Are there things on pages 355 to 362 which, my brother decided, must remain hidden from librul artistic types such as me?

I still haven't made that big breakthrough, to where I enjoy math. Although, in the past year or so, chess, mildly interesting to me already for decades, has become much more interesting, and a large part of chess, or maybe all of it, is math. (Well, no, not all of it. There's also psychology in sizing up one's opponent.)

And when people like Melvin Schwarz -- co-recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics -- are writing about things like vectors, I actually understand part of it. So, hey, lookit that, I actually have learned some calculus! Schwarz also writes things like: "Electromagnetic theory is beautiful!" And I believe him even thought I still don't understand it.


And I still want to understand. So that I can enjoy math at last, and for many other reasons.

Who knows: maybe, if I understand things like advanced physics, I'll become much better at helping people like Neil deGrasse Tyson appreciate things like existentialism.

Science, Art and the Coronavirus

Perhaps you've heard: the unfortunate conflict between scientists and artists is still going on. This conflict is not always such a big deal, but, perhaps you've heard, there's a deadly worldwide plague going on.

Not every scientist is in conflict with every artist. Some scientists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of the arts, and some artists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of science. These people -- I don't know how large a group they represent, I can only hope the group is large and growing quickly -- have grasped that neither science nor art by itself can address all human needs. They realize that art and science can compliment and help each other.

Then there are people like Frank Castorf, an idiot and perhaps Germany's most famous living theatre director. He's become even more famous in the past couple of days by publicly complaining that he doesn't like being told by Angela Merkel to wash his hands, and that he resents not being able to shop and dine out as he is accustomed to do.

And so, since he is one of Germany's most prominent representatives of art, he's causing a lot of damage. Who knows how many deaths he will be directly responsible for.

I wonder, does Castorf resent Merkel telling him what to do because she's a woman? If Germany had a male Chancellor at the moment who was passing along the advice of scientists -- that's all that Merkel is doing, of course: passing along the advice of scientists about how we can best hope to survive this epidemic, not exercising any sort of personal authority over Frank Castorf -- would Castorf enthusiastically support social distancing and masks and hand washing? I suspect he might. He might think of it as a paramilitary sort of discipline. He has some stupid macho tendencies.

Castorf is also, like Donald Trump, making this worldwide crisis all about him. He claims that before the coronavirus outbreak, young people in the theatre wanted old men in the theatre to die as soon as possible. (Castorf is 68 years old.), and that now they want to save every old man they can, even with such allegedly fascist measures as compulsory hand-washing.

No sensible person I know agrees with Castorf that young theatre people were ever wishing old men dead. I suspect the truth may be more something such as that now and then, some big-mouthed, wise-assed young people have said that they wish that Castorf would retire, and Castorf is blowing that way out of proportion and using this particularly thin excuse to wallow in self-pity, at a particularly bad time and in a particularly destructive way.

This conflict between art and science comes from artists and scientists not appreciating what the other group can do. Some scientists think that science can solve all of humanity's problems, some artists think that art can solve all of humanity's problems, and, of course, they're all mistaken. We need both.

Social distancing, masks and hand-washing will save lives. Science has told us that, and there is no doubt at all that science is correct about that. We still have a problem, though, because many people are not listening to this very simple and important message from science. Scientists know how people should best respond to a pandemic, but they don't know how to convince people to respond in the best way. Convincing people to take scientifically-sound, live-saving advice is something that artists are good at -- or, at least, something they can be good at, if they're not completely infantile self-pitying idiots.

Have Watches Become Art?

In roughly chronological order:

Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a Preface which ends with the flat statement: "All art is quite useless."

I was born.

The 4th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, was published. It contains the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray on pp 1681-82. It does not contain any more of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I was required several times in school and college to read works by Oscar Wilde, including, more than once, The Picture of Dorian Gray, including its Preface, with whose conclusion I disagreed. For most of my life I quite disliked Wilde.


I got a copy of the 5th edition, of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for a college class. It's much shorter than the combined 2 volumes of the unabridged version. I have no idea whether it contains the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I still own but I can't find it at the moment.

Quartz watches -- watches powered by batteries or some other electrical source, such as light converted to electricity -- reached the point where they kept much better time than mechanical watches -- watches powered by springs -- at a much lower cost.

I saw the movie An Ideal Husband, based on Wilde's play of the same name. It has been filmed at least 4 times: I saw the 1999 version, directed by Oliver Parker, starring Jeremy Northam, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver and Cate Blanchett. I saw it several years after 1999, on TV, primarily because of Ms Blanchett, about whom I am daffy. Ms Blanchett is particularly adorable in this film. But I liked more than Ms Blanchett, I liked the entire film very much, definitely including those words written by Mr Wilde. I instantly went from being a loather of Wilde to being a huge fan. I re-read the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and began to seriously wonder whether art is indeed useless. I have not stopped thinking about it. At the present I would agree, if we stipulate that Wilde was being somewhat ironic when he wrote that. Art is not useful in the same way as other things. I agree with Nietzsche that art makes life bearable, which means that it is extremely useful indeed; but still, it is not useful in the same way as other things.

I got the 4th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, either free because some place like a university library was giving it away, or for a dollar or so at a thrift shop, I don't remember. I've only got volume 2.

The Coen brothers' film version of Carmac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men was released in 2007. The film is set in 1980. The character portrayed by Josh Brolin carries a wrist watch in his pocket. If the film is historically accurate in this detail, it is a mechanical watch. The title of the movie and novel comes from a line in the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats. Like Wilde, Yeats was born in Ireland. Wilde moved to England, where he ingratiated himself with the upper classes. Yeats stayed in Ireland and supported the fight for independence from England.

I began to become fascinated by watches. Mostly by pocket watches at first;

but the more I learn about watches, the more my interest is captured by wrist watches rather than pocket watches, because watches -- mechanical watches. I couldn't tell you much about quartz watches -- keep becoming more sophisticated and precise and interesting, even as they become farther and farther away from being necessary or practical. There are still some mechanical pocket watches being produced today, but as far as I can see, most of them are presented as objects of nostalgia, designed to remind people of bygone eras when most watches were pocket watches, rather than to closely resemble the most modern products of the watchmaker's -- art.

Ha! Right there I said "art." I was never drawn to pocket watches because I'm nostalgic. I like them because I'd rather carry a watch in my pocket than wear it on my wrist, and pocket watches are designed to be carried that way. But almost all of the really interesting stuff in watchmaking is going on in mechanical wrist watches. Which, as good as they are getting, are still much more expensive than quartz watches which keep better time.

But let's face it, very few if any people actually need quartz watches either, what with all of the online devices which keep even better time, which almost all of us use to one extent or another.

And then, earlier today, my interest in watches, which I freely admit serve no practical use, and are only good for fascinating people and making them feel good, clanged together with Wilde's statement that all art is quite useless. And I said to myself, "Hey -- does that mean that watches have become art, or are becoming art?!"

And then I rushed over here to tell you all about it -- first checking the 4th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, to make sure that I got the quote by Wilde right.

PS, 11 Sep 2017: I found it, the version of The Norton Anthology of English Literature which I got for use an an undergrad. And once again we see how faulty is my memory: it is not called the shorter edition, but the Major Authors Edition. And it is not the 5th edition, but the 3rd. And Wilde is not in it AT ALL. It judges 31 English authors, from the author of Beowulf to Auden, to be Major. But not Wilde. Well, as we know, these things are not only quite useless, but also completely subjective.

A Short Manifesto

Whether or not someone believes that God or gods exist is much less important to me today than before I met a lot of New Atheists who proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that atheism is no guarantee that a person is even a little bit bright. I'm pro-environment, pro-multi-culture, pro LGBT rights (which are just human rights, no more and no less), I'm in favor of universal health care and helping homeless people and refugees. Where people stand on issues like those is much more important to me than their religious beliefs. And despite what some New Atheists and some right-wing Christians will try to tell you, a person's religious beliefs or lack of them is no indicator of where they stand on any of those issues.

I'll admit that I tend to think of theology as worse than useless, but I've read enough philosophy to know that theology and philosophy aren't synonymous, even though many theologians and New Atheists seem to disagree. I think that studying history and philosophy is as important as studying science, and for similar reasons. (And history includes the history of religions, plural.) I like Nietzsche's statement (he was a philosopher, kiddies) that life without music would be a mistake. All the arts do is make life bearable. Many New Atheists are very strong in science, but they tend to cultivate the antagonism between science and the humanities, and that antagonism is very unfortunate -- and only a few centuries old, and much more pronounced in the US than in, for example, Germany. Milton wrote about science and Galileo wrote sonnets, and of course there was Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to choose between science and the arts; in fact, it's very unfortunate when anyone is antagonistic toward one in the supposed name of the other.

Dream Log: Museum Visit With My Brother

Last night I dreamed I was in a museum, not any museum I knew from waking life. It was somewhere in the Detroit area, and it was mostly focused on late-20th- and 21st-century art. It was early evening, a little before twilight in summer, and the museum was crowded with people who'd been let in for an opening or some other special event. Like the identity of the museum, I was fuzzy on what sort of event it was exactly, but I was glad to have been let in. It was my first time there, and I was more interested in roaming the entire building, looking at as much of the entire collection as I could, than in focusing on whatever the opening or special event might happen to be.

Unlike the Guggenheim or a museum designed by Frank Gehry, this building seemed to be made deliberately in order not to compete for attention with the artworks it contained. The building felt new, but it was reminiscent of the Mies and the International Style: very rectangular, very subdued.

Just as I didn't know what museum it was or what the evening's special event was, so too I didn't recognize any individual artworks or know which artists had made them. There were a lot of paintings in monochrome and/or subdued colors, reminiscent of some of the less-colorful work of Marden, Martin, Soulanges and Motherwell. I liked these paintings very much. Then I came upon an artwork which completely covered all four walls of a very large room with a translucent grey-ish substance which looked like plastic which had melted, or like some sort of sugary candy in the process of being cooked -- but no, that's the wrong way to describe it, because it seemed neither warm nor sticky. On the contrary, the overall impression was quite inorganic and cool. Nor was there any smell of plastic. I had never experienced anything like it and I was quite impressed.

Not long after walking through that room, suddenly, my brother was walking along beside me. This was quite surprising, because in waking life, I have never known him to have any appreciation for, or curiosity about, modern art. He's always been a representative of the "my-5-year-old-daughter-paints-better-than-Picasso-did" school of art criticism, Picasso being one of perhaps only three artists, modern or not, whose names he knows, along with Leonardo and Michelangelo. In the dream, he didn't saying anything at all, appreciative or not, about all the non-representational and abstract art all around us. But the museum did contain some pre-modern art, and my brother said something positive about a painting which looked as if it was from the 17th century, showing a man with a grotesquely oversized chin a la Habsburg, astride a white horse.

My brother said he liked this painting, but pointed to the crude and unconvincing depiction of the horse's head, saying he thought this picture was probably made while the artist was still very young. A more mature painter, he said, would have painted the horse in a more realistic manner.

I tried to get my brother to look at the plaque on the wall beside the painting, giving its date and the dates of the birth and death of the painter. It had, in fact, been made when the artist was an old man. I tried to explain to my brother that artistic representations of animals generally had grown much more sophisticated since the 17th century, as mankind's knowledge of biology became more sophisticated. But I wasn't sure whether he was listening to me at all.

"Jump" By Van Halen

You heard me: "Jump," by Van Halen. Not a great record, but not bad either, in my opinion. ("Dance the Night Away" by Van Halen -- now THAT's a great record. That is some world-class electric guitar.)

People have been known to have strong and conflicting opinions about popular music. In 1984, I turned 23, and I and some other people would smoke weed and watch MTV, and "Jump" was in heavy rotation, and I thought Eddie Van Halen was a great guitarist (still do), and another one of those people definitely did not.

It's not so remarkable that a certain guitarist is not a certain person's cup of tea. The reason I'm writing this post is how much this guy disliked Eddie Van Halen. When "Jump" appeared on the tube, he would begin to snarl about how stupid Eddie Van Halen was, putting a fake moronic smile on his face meant to mock Eddie's smile in the video, and bob his head around and say, "Hi! I'm Eddie Van Halen!" and seemed to think that that was a devastating critique. I've been thinking about it for 32 years now, and I still can't see what was deep about his mockery: that was, in fact, Eddie Van Halen in the video, and why shouldn't Eddie smile if he was happy?

And none of this would have been remarkable if the guy who hated Eddie Van Halen so much was a moron, but this guy often said things which were devastatingly profound, about music and about other things. He was better-read in English than I was, and that's saying a lot. He was also a no-foolin' musician, with an impressive knowledge of jazz and classical as well as more popular forms.

It was not just the video of "Jump" which annoyed him greatly. I did as well, when I said that I thought that Eddie Van Halen was quite a guitar player.

I don't know what the consensus of music critics is today concerning Eddie Van Halen -- because I've pretty much stopped paying attention to music critics -- but back then, among critics who paid any attention to popular music at all, most thought he was awful. It's not so much that my friend agreed with them: he WAS one of those critics. Back then, as always, there were some of us who weren't inclined to let any critics' opinions interfere with us enjoying music we actually thought sounded good.

Each one of us was better friends with a third person. It wasn't so much that the music critic and I visited each other. That did happen, but far more often we just happened to visit our mutual friend at the same time. Our mutual friend was more into popular stuff and less into jazz and classical and "alternative rock" than the critic, but I think he followed the critical consensus more than I. I can't remember whether he weighed in when the critic and I would argue about Eddie Van Halen. I don't know whether our mutual friend had no opinion about Eddie. It may well have been that expressing that opinion was less important to him than not aggravating either one of us.

Or maybe he piled onto to me right alongside the critic, and I've suppressed the memory of it.

I heard David Lee Roth (Van Halen's lead singer on "Jump") talk about recording "Jump." He said that he came up with the keyboard riff which opens the song. He said that he was drinking a can of beer, and just mashing the can absentmindedly on the keyboard, and Eddie said Hey that sounds good, and that's the riff. I wonder whether that's true. If so, maybe that anecdote is a legitimate argument, from the critic's point of view, for people with his knowledge of music and his standards, that he's right about Van Halen being crap and about me having my head up my ass when it comes to music: cause the stuff I tend to like amounts to morons absentmindedly mashing on keyboards with beer cans as if they were apes.

The thing is, I don't care. And I think I'd enjoy hanging out with Eddie and David much more than I ever enjoyed hanging out with the critic.

But that's not the end of it: this also gives me insight into how I can be right and justified in my dislike of some writer -- say, Stephen King -- but at the same time, a Stephen King fan could be right not to care what I thought.

Not to mention how both a food critic and I could be right about the same meal, if I ate it and thought it was delicious, while the food critic thought it was disgusting and inedible -- not to mention that we could both be right if he was reading a Stephen King novel and thinking it was genius, and I saw him carrying the novel around and was unable to eat for a day and a half, or how we both could be right if the food critic saw me deeply enjoying Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away" and was appalled, and so on and so forth forever, when it comes to the arts (considering cuisine to be an art form, and there could also be legitimate disagreements about that, and so forth and so on...)

In conclusion, France is a land of contrasts.

me r munkee. me mayk art.

me r munkee. me mayk art.

uh thing cald New Masters Academy sez

"OKAY LISTEN, NOT ALL ART HAS TO BE IN A GALLERY OR A BOOK OR ON STAGE. JUST MAKE SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF OR YOUR FRIEND OR JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE ALIVE AND YOU'RE CONTRIBUTING TO THE MASTERPIECE OF HUMANITY, OK? I LOVE YOU."

that izz verr naiss. ai luv yu tu, New Masters Academy. butt yu sed MASTERPIECE OF HUMANITY and me r munkee.

thats ok. yu prolly dint reelaiz yu wirr dissing munkee an eluhfunt artists wen yu rote that.

i think eluhfunts r awesumz. kittiez tu. that iz just mai opinyun.

i laik kittiez butt sumtaimz thay wil skrach yu or bait yu an it hertz. but thats ok cuz kitties r littel an prolly sumtaimz thay git skeered. if yu hold owt yr hand tu uh kitteh hoo duznt no yu, jist hold yr hand neer thuh kitteh, it will cum up an snif yr hand an that maiks it les skeered and it wil not skrach or bait yu so mutch. ai don no wai that wurks butt it duz.

sum peepl say that wee munkees smel bad. me r sorree iff that r true. maybee it r not tru an peepl hu say that don no munkees.

sum peepl smel. butt prolly not on purpuss.

sum peepl r verr naiss. sum peepl grum munkeez. that iz naiss. wee munkeez grum eech uthur to b kleen butt allso kuzz it feelz naiss.

sumtaimz munkees bait peepl, butt that izz mostlee kuzz weer skeered. sorree.

ai luv yu. bai.

ps me r chimp. sum hyoomuns git mad when yu cal chimpz munkeez sted uv ayps. sorree.

ai luv yu. bai.

Dream Log: Missing Modern Art

I dreamed I was living in a hostel-like building: some people had rooms of their own to live in, others, such as myself, did not. I was staying in a large room with about a dozen other people. I had a small cabinet next to my bed.

Regarded from the outside, the building we were living in resembled a one-family house on a suburban street, with a small patch of lawn. One night I stayed up all night on the lawn painting a canvas about four feet tall by six wide. Other than its size, my painting had a general generic resemblance to some made by Julian Schnabel. The upper left quarter of the canvas contained one short word, the rest of the picture was abstract and had a visual quality reminiscent of the texture rough wood or torn burlap, although it contained a wide palatte of colors. I painted by the porch light until the sun came up, having no trouble seeing what I was doing. Shortly after dawn the painting was done. (In real life I'm no painter.)

Then someone stole it. I went around confronting local thieves and fences, trying to get my painting back. The painting was well-regarded by the local art community, and most people seemed to think it was worth high four figure or maybe a little over $10,000.

I couldn't remember what the word was in the upper-left quarter of the painting, and that hampered my search a bit. But I was sure that I would recognize the painting if I saw it. The thieves and fences were uncooperative, and some started to claim that I hadn't really made the painting. The local artists and art dealers were not much help, because they were afraid of the thieves and the fences. The police were divided between people who were afraid of the thieves, and people working for the thieves.

I wasn't afraid. It surprised me that I wasn't afraid of anyone, but I wasn't. Sometimes people pointed guns at me, and still I wasn't intimidated. I was determined to get my painting back, and I was still busting into thieves' and fences' homes and places of business and pushing them around and searching for my painting, and telling them that I wasn't planning to give up, and the simplest thing for them would just be to give up what they'd stolen, and then not bother me any more in the future, when I woke up.

Arts & Humanities & Sciences

Some people will tell you that in the Renaissance in Europe, there were some people who were both artists and scientists, and that these glorious individuals were what we now call "Renaissance men." But the truth is even more delicious than that: up until the Renaissance, in Western "civilization," it never even occurred to anyone to separate the arts from the sciences. People thought it was only natural for someone gifted in one area to be gifted in the other. And of course, it only is. Only after the Renaissance did this ugly and unnatural separation and antagonism between the arts and the science begin to grow and fester. I want no part of that split, and I'm hardly the first to reject it.

As long as I can remember I've been artistically-inclined. As a small child, unfortunately, I shared an attitude toward science which was widespread among artists and ranged from indifference to hostility. Then in the 1970's I read Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, which helped me to several big breakthroughs, mentally. It greatly eased my paranoia, for one thing, by explaining to me what paranoia is: namely, a great over-estimation of one's own importance to others. More than 9 times out of 10 they're not only not out to get you, they rarely give you a thought one way or another.

For another thing, the novel made me interested in science and technology, and refuted my notion that these were in opposition to the arts & humanities. Gravity's Rainbow's author, Thomas Pynchon, had studied engineering physics at Cornell from 1953 to 1955, then dropped out and spent 2 years in the Navy, then returned to Cornell and switched his major to English and for the most part concentrated (for the next 58 years so far) on writing fiction -- fiction which refers to scientific and technical topics as well as to poetry and music and the visual arts and so forth, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

Which of course it is. Pynchon is not the only one who behaves as if there were no rules against liking both the sciences and the arts. Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso come to mind, each a great admirer of and great influence upon the other. It seems that for nearly 4 decades, ever since first encountering Gravity's Rainbow, I had been living in a state of grace, removed from that stupid, ignorant opposition between art & science of which I had been a part as a child. Somehow managing to not to pay a lot of attention to how many scientists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the arts and how many artists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the sciences.

To be sure, I had noticed for a few years already that there was an entire group of scientists ignorant of the arts & humanities: the New Atheists. But then just very recently it came home to me that there had been an abysmally equivalent counterpart to the New Atheists infesting the humanities departments of many universities for decades before the New Atheists were so called. I'm talking about the postmodernists. And I don't think that many of them have ever been able to get any sort of jobs outside of the humanities departments of universities. (Nota bene, humanities departments are far from entirely Postmodernist and there have always been many academic historians, philosophers and critics who couldn't stand this PoMo crap in the slightest.) The Postmodernists despise what they think is the entire group of scientists, but which is actually only the group of New Atheists -- who should be despised for their ignorance of art and history and philosophy. Conversely, the New Atheists look with contempt at the dopey postmodernists, worthy of contempt with their contempt for science -- except that the New Atheists mistake the postmodernists for the whole of the arts & humanities.

They walk among us to this very day: New Atheists who think that "modern art is a fraud," and Postmodernists who think that all scientists are right-wing reactionaries. If that were not enough, and it certainly would be, it seems that Postmodernists also tend to claim as their own all sorts of perfectly sensible people who would've wanted nothing to do with them, from the Dadaists to Heidegger to the Abstract Expressionists to Borges to Nabokov to Gaddis and, yes, even Pynchon.

So it seems that all we need to do is to get all of the New Atheists together with all of the Postmodernists. (New Atheists very often reject that label, but that's okay, they're still easy enough to spot. On the other hand, only someone who describes him- or herself as a Postmodernist, is a Postmodernist.) Then they can expend all of their energy against one another, and leave the rest of us much more free to accomplish things and hopefully even enjoy life now and then.

Albert Schweitzer And My Kittycat George, And Science And Religion And Art

I gather that Albert Schweitzer claimed that science cannot tell us why we love our children. Some scientists would disagree. Some years ago I wasted a part of my life arguing with a particularly unpleasant theologian, who at one point claimed that science's explanations were robbing life of its wonder. I said I disagreed, and used the example of the big beautiful lazy silly wonderful loving cat I had at the time, George, who would often sit in my lap and purr while I sat at my computer and engaged in these Internet fooferahs. I said that the fact that I had learned that George's DNA was very similar to mine had increased my sense of wonder and awe about life, and about how amazing George and other living things were, not decreased it at all. My point is that I think that people, possibly including Schweitzer, who are afraid of losing something precious and beautiful if science makes them lose their religion, are simply underestimating science.

(I say "possibly including Schweitzer" because it's not clear whether or not he actually believed in God. I'm coming more and more to the position that if a person lived in the 20th century or later in Europe or the Americas, and therefore had the option of announcing that he or she didn't believe in God, and it's not clear whether or not he or she did, as in the case of Schweitzer, and the case of Einstein -- then it's not particularly important what he or she believed in regard to God. Because if it had been terribly important, and essential to understanding other things he or she had said, he or she would have made his or her position clear. If, that is, it had been possible to do so. Quite often such a thing is not possible, simply because a person is a true agnostic who leans neither one way nor another, has no clear position on God's existence, and simply doesn't know what to think about it.)

These fooferahs rage, with atheists such as myself on one side insisting that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion, and on the other side believers, who either are scientists or claim not to be completely ignorant of science, insisting that that there is no such inherent conflict. You know, if they just said "science and art" instead of "science and religion," and made all the claims for art which currently they make for religion, I'd completely, enthusiastically agree with them. Religion and art have one very big thing in common, of course: in both pursuits it's essential to constantly make things up. In both pursuits make-believe is an irreplaceable part of the process. Grasp that, and suddenly it makes perfect sense why one is so much more likely to encounter religious believers among great artists than among great scientists.

The huge and essential difference between art and theology, of course, is that artists have the common decency to admit that they're making things up, and theologians don't.

But just change one word, say "art" instead of "religion," and I'm on board, 100%: Yes, people with no feeling for art are dead inside. Yes, art makes life worthwhile. Art gives life meaning. It offers essential comfort. It offers joy. Yes, there is no inherent conflict whatsoever between science and art, in fact, there's a lot that they can do for each other. All of the things which these yutzes keep claiming for religion, if they'd make those claims for art instead, boom, suddenly I'd have no problem with them anymore.

One word, guys. That's all I'm asking for.

How Art May Save Us From Ourselves

Who was that stand-up comic who finished his set saying "Less killing! More art! Less killing! More art!" ? I wish I could remember your name, Dude, I'd give you props. That was a nice finish. I thought of that finish as I saw some old-master paintings on EWTV. (Yeah, that's right, I watch Eternal Word TV sometimes, you got a problem with that? No? Good!) I generally find EWTV pretty dismal and depressing. But the art -- that epitomizes what I came there for. And I wondered, Does it epitomize Catholicism for a lot of Catholics? And I thought, Would it help ease tensions between Muslims and Christians if they knew more about each others' art? And I thought, How could it help but ease tensions? Art is the expression of the deepest within us, it goes way past little things like fear and hatred and distinctions of religion. Here is a Western European painting from around 1300:



Here's a tile from Iran from around the same time:



So what were they fighting about? (OMG they still are aren't they? Maniacs! Murderers!) The amazing part is that even back then not all of them were fighting. You had to be a rebel to be a Western European back than and not display enmity to Islam, but it could be done.

(The Europeans were penning those big wild African elephants behind chain-link gates, chain-link as high as a wild African elephant. And as if that weren't bad enough, they were painting chevrons onto the elephants foreheads! Red-white-and-blue chevrons! But then a young slender earnest beautiful woman among them, who looked like Liv Tyler or Jessica Biel, as slender and earnest as that, struggled past their objections with the help of a young earnest Western man, risking trampling they threw the tall gates back open! And then it thundered and rained as they hugged like Edward Norton and Liv Tyler in The Incredible Hulk. Yes, as earnestly in love and as beautifully soaked with rain as that.)



It's very hard to kill someone with a painting. Paintings are very unwieldy weapons. That's just one of the nice things about them.



Hate tends to generalize: "They all blablabla..." "All of them! All of them want to yibbity yibbity yibbity..." Art draws you back into the present. You look, you really look. At the specific.



And just possibly when you look up from the pretty picture, or you're released from the spell of the organ music and incense or the chanting, you'll also really see that person, the one you're convinced is gonna GIT ya! here, now, as he or she is, and leave some of that frightened "All of them...!" ranting behind. Charging out on your stallion to slay Saracens is one thing; killing Salim, who has a shy and deep affection for the neighbors' daughter and wants to learn to paint, he's not very good yet but he's taking lessons and trying very hard, is quite another. We kill randomly, forgetting that everyone dies very specifically. We love specifically. We spare people and other creatures specifically. None of this is new, I know, I know...