The Fanatical Art Lover

The fanatical art lover had never imagined that something serious or real might occur to him. He had been living in a peach universe, where everything was sweet and safety wrapped. The man had already found his guard against boredom, he thought, and aside from this he felt that he had become almost immortal because of all the works created by old world famous masters, which he gradually had been using most of his life to become very familiar with. The works of others were only rarely complimented, since he was engaged in loving art rather than in critiquing it. When on a rare occasion he expressed his emotions concerning art, it nearly always was in the form of a spontaneous outcry of joy, shouting or the like.

Those that have experienced his reaction and who did not know him misunderstood his enthusiasm as being a primitive form of orgasm which usually is only available to inexperienced art fans. But those who had had the pleasure of really getting to know him understood that when he reacted like that then it has to be really, really good. But his reaction on the last day of March, where he went amok and nearly tore down a world famous painting from the wall, nobody was able to understand. It seemed as if he in an instant had changed from a semi-fanatical art lover into an overly fanatical art hater. Or one might say as if the arts from being his best friend has suddenly chosen to turn around and spit him right in the face.

One gets the strange sensation when for many hours one has admired the accumulated  cultural treasures of the country that are being stored in museums, in depots, at foundations, in trusts, and in private collections. The love of art is ever changing its being, because sometimes it more resembles a remote but dear relative, at other times more a difficult foster child. There they are, the sculptures, and there the many pictures are  attached; everything speaks to one. But it may occur that as a museum visitor one may feel that the creative artists are rather speaking down to people, and then one may feel somewhat excluded. Then it will be possible to feel that one, instead of being rewarded for one's eager loyalty and enriched for one’s effort, is rather being cheated and drained of energy. However, the normal enthusiasm usually soon returns. Normally, I say deliberately, because normal is not the same as always. 

I immediately saw that it was a fake, because I had on one prior occasion seen the original work of art at the Vincent van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It happens to be quite a few years ago that I was there, but the impression was so strong and intense that it permanently made a mark upon my memory. It was something about the colors, about the nuances between the different variations of the yellow, the play in the colors. There was something about the picture which was at once vulnerable and open which fascinated me back then, and which I had now expected would fascinate me once more. The problem was, however, that I hardly felt anything, and then I knew with certainty that something was completely wrong. 

The revisionist parade exhibitions in reality meant nothing, because they symbolized so-called permanent institutions that would anyway soon gather dust at the Mausoleum of Times or gather slime at the bottom of the ocean like some modern Atlantis. 

Nevertheless, the symbols had made a deep and lasting impression on the population, and for the elders even the most perfidy form of historical scrutiny could not make them give up the hope about a return to the grandeur of ancient times. However, it was the last few pictures I saw at the museum, the second half of the exhibition, that made the deepest  impression. There were old men and country wives dressed in rough clothing, the women being masculine with scarves that were big enough to double as napkins. There was machinery and warn-down horse carriages that with broken wheels had taken their part of the work down the unpaved country roads and finally unloaded bulging amount of cabbage, potatoes, and other vegetables at the market square.  

There was the schoolhouse, just a little worn-down building, that with respect to height seemed to be designed for children, some sort of dollhouse. In reality, it was just an old fashioned building designed for the short people of past days. 

When afterwards I tried to create some context between all of these expressionless faces, all on black and white pictures, and the explanatory text it was impossible. For whereas the pictures were authentic portraits, the accompanying text had been written by present highly educated anthropologists and historians. It is obvious that there is a bottomless gap between the naked, rough village reality and the finely measured interpretation. The contrast gave me the occasion for a not insignificant feeling of discomfort accompanied by an almost uncontrollable, if relatively short lasting, anger attack. How pretentious, how extravagant, how decadent! 

He gave the listless performance of someone who supports the intangibles. Each day was like an annulment of a prior occasion with symbols and objects flying through space. Art had converted itself into subject matter, which had transformed itself into substance, which had miraculously evaporated or at least thinned itself into the form of the very air which he was breathing. 

Apart from his curiosity, which was becoming fascination bordering on obsession, he knew from his faculty for cold logic that he had to comprehend the fundamental dynamics underlying this sullen, subtle transformation of the basic values in which he had been believing so firmly and almost blindly. He wanted to reconcile himself with the new disorder, yet he couldn't handle it unless he understood why chaos has erupted where order and systematic thinking used to be. Could such a vacuum, such as sliding of values occur all by itself, or did it have to be a consequence of some natural law which it obeyed? That he would like to know, and he would not easily be able to settle his mind before he started knowing at least some of the answer. 

A problem which confronted him at first was that he had to find someone worthy of his confidence, someone in whom he could confide without any fear of ridicule or betrayal. He knew a great deal of people from all venues of the art world, but most of these were establishment types who did not take it lightly when someone came up and presented some theory without having solid philosophical and empirical foundation for it. He knew that his observations might easily be taken for little but pure speculation, that those very same observations could easily be devalued or even rejected as being the deformed product of an empty, yet obsessively compulsive mind that was in a panic-stricken manner searching for an object to which it could devote itself and its superfluous energies. 

He was an art lover by devotion rather than by education, he lacked the grand precise vocabulary that was available to most of his acquaintances within the art community. Not himself being a famous artist, he lacked the credit given to those people who were so manic depressive that they could freely be exhilarated one day and down the next without ever having to account to anyone for their mood swings. When a creative artist explored new territory and tried to tear down the walls of the established, that was looked upon as some creative necessity that was “sine qua non” to creativity. Whereas when an art lover or an art critic voiced some apprehension about established theories, he or she had damned better be right! 

Not knowing where to turn and not being able to identify anyone in whom to confide, the art lover found himself in a precarious state of mind, where he had to enter untested territory all alone and without much expectation of a reward of any kind. He might at this juncture have decided that maybe the moment had come to give up his passion for paintings and such, yet he knew that quite apart from the objects of art themselves his keenness was attached to that of knowledge itself, like some Socratesian quest for knowledge. He knew that art was but one manifestation of emotion and reason and experience, and that if a given art period was to be exempted from human understanding because of some doctrinaire confusion, then the art world would not suffer nearly as much as would society at large. So he had decided once again to link art, i.e. the concrete, to philosophy, i.e. the abstract, and to use art as a form of material or at least visible manifestation of the grand theories of philosophy and human thought and reflection and experience and emotion, i.e. art was becoming some form of visible poetry.