Living Art

Ever have one of those days when it feels like the universe is conspiring to do you good? Yesterday was like that for me. My teaching gig ends early on Thursdays and no sooner did I get home than a couple of dear friends from out of town popped in ready to have some fun. It so happened that the De Young Art Museum in San Francisco was having its annual Bouquets to Art event so we jumped in the car and crossed the Bay Bridge jones-ing for some serious eye candy.

Bouquets to Art is an ingenious fundraiser in which florists all over Northern California come to the De Young and choose a work of art in the De Young collection to interpret with a flower arrangement. Wow! Did these people get inspired! Flowers transformed into Aztec anacondas, gumball machines, molecular matrixes, abstract fever dreams of color. There was even a life-size rendition of a figure from an impressionist painting made of various hues of lichens and mosses. Floral-gasmic!

These kinds of events get unintentionally conceptual when you have a flower arrangement that pays tribute to a Georgia O'Keefe painting that glorifies flowers. Life celebrating art celebrating life celebrating art. The world as museum. Mundanity as masterpiece. Suddenly you get it. A flower is art, except, as my favorite mad scientist once said, "It's alive!"

As we left the De Young we made jokes about the Great Blue Heron poised like a still life in a nearby fountain. "What a finely detailed installation!" we enthused. Is it really a Great Blue, a good Blue or just a passing example of the Creator's blue period? Everyone's a critic.

Later when we were having dinner at a Oaxacan fusion joint on Chestnut Street I couldn't help myself. I left my companions momentarily, walked across the street to the flower shop and bought a spray of yellow tea roses, a rust orange lily, a blood red Gerbera daisy and a vase to grace our table. Suddenly the table became "tableau". Life again became art. Just as the Creator (or "curator"?) intended.

Escape from Mass Media

A cautionary tale:

Joe Everyman lies in a pool of regret and despair in a hospital bed in Anytown USA, watching the cartoon pig on the television overhead yammer his epitaph with the giddy mirth of a drunken clown. As a loony tune bounces around in the background, the man hears, "That's all folks!" The phrase echoes over and over again in his head and he realizes to his horror that this obnoxious box blaring down at him has stalked him from cradle to grave like a blathering idiot Siamese twin attached inoperably to his skull.

The box was his first babysitter and, jabbering from the ceiling of every room in the ward, it will be the last thing he ever hears on this earth. As his last breath rattles out of his body, his life flashes before his eyes. What does he see? Just what you'd expect. Re-run after re-run: of Letterman having a spat with Madonna; Fear Factor contestants choking down blended maggot smoothies; self-righteous smirks from sleazeball pundits, news show hosts, and presidents with a license to lie.

And as Everyman sinks into the dark underworld beneath the onslaught of all the dreck he's ever absorbed, he must face it once and for all. He's wasted his precious days flipping the channels in a vain search for meaning, looking for truth in all the wrong places.

Lately I've been asking myself: Why is this commercial culture from top to bottom and wall to wall so utterly devoid of intellectual and emotional intelligence? The official answer, of course, is that the media are just accommodating the desires of a nation of morons. But in fact, they've made us stupid so they can sell us some snake oil from the back of their carnival wagons. They spread fear so they can sell protection; they instill doubt so they can sell confidence. The uber-corporations that own the media promote a violent, vengeful, fractious world view so they can sell their weapons and drugs and mountains of cheaply made stuff to fill the terrifying void people feel in their souls.

But I still find some basis for hope. And I still believe that in my last moments here on earth, the flashback of my life will be sweetened by images of unity, beauty, joy, dignity, goodness, and love.

I hold a vision of a grand, sweeping, heartfelt, soul-based, love-fed culture rising. Thanks to the Internet and the intelligence and heart of people all over the world, a positive change is underway. That's what this blog is intended to explore, celebrate, foment.

What makes me think so? It's already happening. Tune in next time.


"Let the beauty we love be what we do." -- Rumi
"Boldness has beauty, power, and magic in it." -- Goethe