Abstract

William Deresiewicz („Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art“):

Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for—why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it. What do I mean by increasing life? How can we live more, given that we can’t live longer? Through attention and intensity. Being fully present to the world, and feeling without reservation: the two things that making art requires and that experiencing it involves. “Being in love,” Tim Kreider writes, “is one of the only times when life is anything like art,” but the reverse is also true. Art is one of the only times when life is anything like being in love. Attention, intensity. It is also one of the only times when waking life is anything like dreaming. I awaken from a dream, from its saturation of meaning and feeling, its world of color and complete fulfillment, its crowd of presences, of distant friends, old lovers, dead parents, to the drabness of quotidian life, to the narrowness of my existence, to my same old dismal self. Oh yeah, it’s me again. How can I regain that paradise, which was here just a moment ago? Only through art: through music, through story, through the alchemy of verse. I was listening to Abbey Road the other day. Somewhere between “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Golden Slumbers,” I finally understood Nabokov’s definition of aesthetic bliss: “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” It is in this respect, and this one only, that art is utopian (and the reason that it gets dragooned for service to political utopias, which are a completely different kind of thing). Art connects us with another world, which has no place in ours. That world is, to use a term at which my reason recoils, the spirit world. Traditional societies did not feel the need to justify what we call art. Its purpose was obvious to them: to conjure spirits, to converse with divinity, to tap the source of being. Art is a fountain of spirit—that’s the closest I can come to it, though I’m thinking less of water than of magma. There is a crack, somewhere. Something flows, from somewhere. We gather around it; we build temples to it, which we call theaters and museums; we worship its earthly channels, whom we call geniuses; we talk about it endlessly. We may even posit that the thing that our existence is for is art.

Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:2 ration, 2022.

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Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:2 ration, 2022.

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Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:2 ration, 2022.

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Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:1 ration, 2022.

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Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:2 ration, 2022.

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Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:1 ration, 2022.

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Digital Photography, extremely processed, 1:2 ration, 2022.

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Terroir 147, 1:1 ration, 2023.

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