Art vs Commerce Part I: An Existential Crisis
On giving up one’s cushy 9-to-5 job in search of immortality
MY OFFICE IS LOCATED less than five minutes from the National Gallery of Canada, where, on occasion, to briefly alleviate the ongoing spiritual crisis that the following essay is an attempt to resolve, I spend my lunch hour wandering among the old paintings in the international gallery. The collection is excellent. There are works by Botticelli, Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse — all those famous dudes, those notable artists.
I prefer the international gallery to the others because my goal in spending time at the museum is to feel unmoored from the present, set adrift in time and space. There is something, too, about contemporary art, in which so much is implicit in colour and shape and texture, that bears too close a kinship with the work I do during the day as a creative director at an advertising agency.[1]
[1. In the course of developing a brand identity there is always much grandiose debate about whether, for example, an enterprise solution is better represented by an equilateral or isosceles triangle, or whether, say, the colour green represents the principle of customer success better than the colour blue (the answers to these questions are, obviously, equilateral and green).]
So, yes, I prefer these old paintings. I prefer to wander through pastoral Dutch landscapes; I prefer to stand in 17th-century Italian piazzas; I prefer to make meaningful eye contact with long-dead Medici power brokers (the kind of meaningful eye contact I can never summon the courage to make with my colleagues back at the office).
These dead men are known to me, many hundreds of years later, because of these images they’ve created. I know Salomon van Ruysdael — and feel deeply connected to him — because in “River Landscape” he decided to put that gull below the horizon line, close to the surface of the water, rather than up in the sky, like any rational person might expect, and it’s that small detail that makes the painting superlative to me. I want to be immortal like these guys. I want my small aesthetic choices to be recognized a hundred years from now and pondered over with the same wonder and intensity that I myself have pondered over Ruysdael’s seagull and Nabokov’s alliterations and Bart Sears’ biceps. Forget modern medicine and its immortality pills; drawing lines and choosing words and making choices that are contemplated centuries hence: that is the secret to living forever.
I seek that same immortality. I seek to live as an artist and contribute to the ongoing dialogue between conscious beings that has been taking place since the first spear-wielding stick figure was scratched onto the wall of a cave. In a consciousness beset by self-doubt and self-consciousness and pretty much every anxiety that can be prefixed with “self” (hatred, immolation, involvement, medication, deceit, conceit, loathing, etc.) it’s the one thing I am reasonably confident that I am capable of doing.
So, why am I afraid to do it?
Next Week: Art vs Commerce Part II: The Not Uncommon Struggle
