About

Too much art is about life — love, betrayal, war, jobs, depression, travel.  Anyone who’s lived long enough knows all these topics back and forth and is bored by them.  Anyone my age (said a philosopher) is ready for a different movie.  Art — abstract art — porcelain cups, say, or geometrically patterned carpets, or a string quartet can provide an escape from the dull facts of life.

Yet, for all this boredom, surprisingly little life is about art.  It’s puzzling why it should be so:  art can divert with its novelty, its un-same-sameness.

OK, most of us have an excuse in the form of time-deficit:  jobs + commute + house work make a dull boy duller.  But some have a light work load, do not commute, and are lucky not to have to do housework.  They could do what I do.

But if they do it, they do not tell us about it.  The result:  while there are millions of books telling you about male-female relationships — their tiresome predictability would hardly seem to deserve such a massive effort at analysis — there are hardly any books on man-art relationships; hardly any guides on how to navigate one’s life through it. There are no manuals for aspiring art connoisseurs, no reports on the spiritual adventures in the world of culture.

This blog tries to put something in that gap.