The Distance of Art

I have a very ambiguous relationship with art. See, I was an actor once upon a long while ago, and I like to think that I was at the very least a competent one. I lived the life of a denizen of the theater. I woke up, went to classes (later to a day job), rehearsals in the evening, shows at night, repeat daily. When I wasn’t in the cast, I would help out on the tech side: sound or lighting design or tech, set construction or destruction, whatever was needed on whatever show was going on at the time.

It was a completely different world. I remember with clarity the heated arguments about every last nuance of every last action, utterance or business. It was deadly serious that the person you were delivering a monologue to stood with her weight on the up or downstage foot. If the set couch were slightly angled, or otherwise not on its mark, this was a real problem.

The odd thing is that I’ve left that world. I haven’t been on stage in about a decade, and that was dinner theatre, so it probably doesn’t even count. So, I’m not in that world anymore. I look back at the effort that went into the minutiae of each production. Was it really crucial that I have a 30 minute discussion with the director about whether or not I should carry the pen for the scene, or put it down on the table half way through? I can say with certainty that, at the time, it was very important, not only to me, but to the director as well.

Not only were these things important to us, but they were important to the audience, or at least we saw it as so. If the ambient sound cue came in a split second to early or late, then the audience wouldn’t be in the right place emotionally when it came time for the lead character’s admission. If this didn’t happen, then we as artists wouldn’t have done our job well enough to affect the audience. We wanted our art to have an impact on them.

So now when I look at photographs for the photography class, I see a lot of things. I enjoy a technically precise image. I love thoughtful and even playful images. But there are some that I really don’t like. And the main reason that I find coming up again and again is that they look too pretentious. The artist that wants to cut to the core of what it means to be human generally ends up boring me. That’s not to say by any means that photography, or any form of art cannot do just that, it is just that I find myself irritated with those who fail at it(in my estimation).

There are artists who explain their photography and enlighten me. I can look again at their photographs and see something more, something deeper, but there are some pieces that I have enjoyed until I hear the artist describe the meaning behind the image. Then when I look again at the photo that I had enjoyed, I just think of what the artist said, and suddenly I don’t like the photo as much.

Have I distanced myself so far from the world of art that I can no longer appreciate the artists that want to change the world? Do I now exist in a world where the placement of a certain phrase is vital to me and irrelevant to those outside my sphere? Are the crucial arguments I have now only to be curious artifacts to a future me?