/lit/ - Literature

>>14314001
Great thread, I will give my input with a story:

When I was a teenager, my older sister was a senior at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, which in the Boston area is considered one of the best art schools in the region. With the free museum passes we got with her student ID, we went for a day and explored the Museum or Fine Arts together. I remember entering an empty gallery where the only art in the room was a series of machined planks. Wood, finely sanded and polished into nothing but what seemed to be the side dimension of a dresser drawer, scattered across the room in random places. I got angry.

My older sister worked extremely hard to forge her talent, and even from a young age it was incredible to watch her process. From the time she was a toddler she’d spend hour scribbling away with crayons at her miniature desk, and by the time she was in fourth grade, she went twice per week after school to her mentor’s house for practice, and she loved every second of it, often calling our mother and asking to spend a couple more hours with her teacher Rhoda, a kind older lady who used to be a high school art teacher. She would come home with these intricate detail drawings of human hands, and soon it was faces in every expression. I watched her improvement with these hundreds of sheets, month after month, year after year as what she poured from her mind onto the canvas became more and more lifelike, more expressive, and with a greater strength of character. Wether it was watercolor, oil, pastel, graphite, charcoal, anything, my sister has this incredible gift to perceive render anything she wants. But it didn’t get there overnight. She worked her way into mastery. Growing up with this artist, stepping over her supplies and walking under her framed work on the walls of our home gave me a true appreciation for that creative process which is very much built with great concentration over a lifetime.

I remember being a teenager and looking at those planks, and how angry it made me feel. I complained about it and how terrible it was, and I looked over to my sister as she stared at them too. There was this air of quiet resignation about her, in the sense that she knew better, that she was better than the work laid out in front of her. It did not phase her. Later that day we got lunch together and I asked her about the planks and what she thought of them.

“Anon, those were brags. They were items created by an established artist who built a career on intricate and skillful work, until they got to the point of self-sustainment. It’s an ‘I made it,’ a brag. Ignore it, focus on your own art, and don’t take these people so seriously.”

To this day, I’m not so sure I agree with her, because it seems to me that visual art and exclusively visual art is abused in this manner. We have lost our respect of creative skill in favor of the statement, and that to me is a tragedy.

She painted his one at the age of 13.