Art is Garbage
What truly deems something to be art? A question I pondered on my bike ride to work. Truly nothing was art. Art was ugly. If you can create anything and call it art then where is the meaning? What is life, and what is beauty? It was all garbage. We are all to end up dead with no meaning for it. We will lose everything and it would have meant nothing to anybody else. All that we’ve worked towards to be looked past. A sculpture created out of pain on display in an exhibit just to disappear among all the others. So what deems something art? I do not know, perhaps whatever is done can be art, perhaps art is the only justice some people will see, an explanation for all the pain and hardships that come from just being alive. How can I be empathetic towards anyone else’s art but my own?
It's as if it were a blessing to get to relate to loss. To be able to see and feel the loss that many people carefully try to avoid. To be able to live an event without having to live out it. To view a man who created some art and to bear witness to its destruction. I have struggled to give such a lonely heart justice in my writing, to put into words the pain that I had carried for him, someone who wasn’t even real, but so incredibly real to me. I was still in pain for a week after I dreamt him up. As if a cloak was over my heart to remind it of life’s bitter sadness. It didn’t go away when I worked, or when I slept. It reminded me of all the pain I felt on behalf of someone who isn’t real, and I feel more than obligated to provide some kind of justice for his memory.
I just left the art show with my collection of art in my hands. I had started onto the parking lot to my car when a couple of people came up to me, they started to harass me. They had taken some of my art and tossed it around to each other. They were keeping it from me, I had attempted to get them back. In my attempt to get the art back that I worked so hard on, they were all shattered. Everything I had made was broken. Everything that I made with such patience and care was broken. I had gathered it all in my arms, every broken piece. I sat down on the curb in front of the show, clutching the shards, and I started to cry. Holding the art and myself into a ball up on that curb. This was all I had, art pieces that I took extra care to make to give myself some joy and to bring to an art show, destroyed. This is all I had, clutching the pieces and the pain started to form, I have nothing left, and what I did have is now gone. The art was made for this art show. I thought to myself that at least the art show was fun, at that moment, the pain hit. I had tried to comfort myself, to make it all a little better. It had only made me feel more pain and sadness of being nothing with nothing to the point that my entire life had centered on this art show. I wondered ‘what now?’ Where do I go? The tears only got harder. I curled up into my knees, wailing as the minutes went by, with tears that started to make my eyes in pain….. I woke up, finding myself in a puddle of my own tears.
I woke up, tears still yet falling from my eyes. A pain formed in my heart. I knew this was the hardest I’ve ever cried, harder than when my dog died, the dog that comforted an emotionally sensitive kid through their younger years. Harder than any goodbye. Harder than all the times I’ve felt angry at life and would have violent fits of rage just to collapse in tears. In this dream I felt the loss of everything bear down on this man, something as simple as art, being so emotionally connected to it that when it shattered, it not only shattered his heart but the barrier to mine. The pain was cut deep, and I could describe it as the worst pain I’ve ever felt despite it not even being physical. I felt empty, but not alone, I had him and his memory, but what could I do?
So what truly deems life to be beautiful? Life is ugly sometimes, something that you wish you could crumble like wet clay on a wheel and start again. We live life knowing that surely others are suffering but without knowing their pain to be able to relate to it. We walk past art on display, perhaps if we stop and take a good look at it. Study its intricacies. Knowing the way to create art brings us closer to each other, to be able to see the technique used to create such a beautiful yet devastating piece of art. Walk into a museum of art, are the painters all dead? The sculptors themselves crumbling in the ground? The artist lives on in their art. I got to know a man burdened with having nothing, an artist who cried, and I, the one to carry his memory, however real. I wrote desperately the next night after work, wrote for him, wrote for his memory, and wrote in hopes to bring justice to his sadness and this pain that I feel. That night, I wrote out a promise to the lonely and the beaten, to be their shoulder to cry on. I wrote it in hopes that no one had to be alone like him.
From this, I had the most devilish conclusion, that this pain is truly necessary for us, that if we could cry so hard for the loss of something, it just means we cared. I doubt if I died right now, that people would cry as hard as that man did for his art. I hope that I can comfort someone like that art did to him, for when I die I want people to feel the pain, I need them to hurt, to show how much they truly cared for me. It may seem selfish but you better cry and mourn me or else I am gonna feel sad as a ghost.
Sikkema, Senior. These are a few things that I wrote. Don’t be too judgemental, please.