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.