Art Appreciation and Me

Whenever I find myself wandering the pristine halls of an art museum I’m always there with someone else, someone who is both better looking than me and more finely attuned to the intricacies of artistic expression. The attractiveness part I can come to terms with; it’s the latter that makes me more than a little jealous. I just don’t have the ability to dissect a painting or see past its surface. At best I’m either pleased or turned off by a shape or a mixture of colors, a nice image or maybe an expression on a subject’s face. I cannot tell what the artist was thinking when he captured the soft circle of a woman’s bare breast, or when someone shattered glass around an iron scaffolding. And instead of experiencing the subtle joy and elation that others feel, I’m left like a hillbilly child visiting relatives in the city, mouth toothless and gaped with uncertainty.

As a rule, I tend to stay away from places that remind me just how uncultured I am — a fine wine tasting, Shakespearean plays, restaurants offering anything other than cheeseburgers or spaghetti — mostly out of fear that I’ll make a fool of myself, that I’ll be found out. At best, the image I’ve carved out for myself through years of careful lies and deceit is one of me keeping up with culture, nowhere above anyone else but barely treading water. In reality, I’m the guy who steps into a fine restaurant wearing a t-shirt reading “I’m not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look,” and when I’m asked to please leave I’m not sure why. On the rare occasions I’m not dressed like a slob or an overgrown teenager and I do manage to get seated, if I’m not careful a gazing couple might spot me trying like a buffoon to crack open a lobster tail. And so it’s just easier to avoid such places.

Shakespearean plays hold a similar danger. By default anyone looking forward to attending a performance of Shakespeare must have an IQ of 150 or above; as for me, I’m usually dragged there by friends, theater people themselves who can recite perfectly metered love sonnets and soliloquies in their sleep. In high school, though I never would have admitted it then, I was really in the same league as the jocks and the hardcore stoners when it came to matters of Shakespearean tragedy. Had it not been for our textbook’s annotations I would have floundered in the lines of iambic pentameter forced upon us, and even with the textbook’s help when we were asked to write a report on a play it was like being given a handful of wooden blocks and told to build a fully-functioning locomotive. Overcome with anxiety, I might find myself searching the internet for someone’s online notes or, if a deadline was fast approaching, an entire paper that I could purchase and pass off as my own. At live performances that same sense of helplessness falls over me, and before the first act is up I’m listening not to the actors but to my fellow theatergoers, searching for that collective intake of breath that precedes a laugh or a groan, something that they’ve all caught and I haven’t. Then I’ll laugh with them, and keep my charade as a genuine purveyor of intellect and refinement. One of their peers. An equal.

At an art museum, however, it’s a little easier to slide by unnoticed. For the most part museums are quiet places where the people around you have something to look at and distract them from the fraud in their midst.

Several of my friends are quite good at judging artwork; my friend Rusty, an artist himself, can take a look at a painting and tell me any number of things about its technique, placement on the artistic timetable, and its similarity in style to other artists’ works. Whenever he does this, I’m left in awe. “How do you know all that?” I’ll want to ask, but I don’t, because my inquiring would make me seem less upscale and erudite. Instead, I simply nod, scratching my chin as if contemplating, and mumble, “True, true. Yeah.”

Amber, a high school friend of mine, might lose herself in the swoops and circles of a painting for what seems like hours on end. And even without the aid of drugs — prescription or otherwise — she can find something to focus on, something the canvas triggers in her and makes resonate. Meanwhile, I’m wondering what the hell a series of concentric squares scribbled in harsh yellow lines is supposed to mean to anyone, and I’ll look at my watch for the hundredth time to see how soon we’re going to eat lunch.

The one part of the museum I can enjoy is the statues. Although I can appreciate the fine craftsmanship and extensive detail in all of them, my favorites are the ones that appear to have been in severe personal accidents. There’s nothing more interesting than a statue of a woman, staring off to the side longingly, with arms that stop at her elbows, or a bust of a face with its nose and finer features askew and exaggerated. Maybe it’s just the morbid part of me that’s engaged by these, but I find them the most interesting part of the museum experience not because of what the particular artist was trying to express, but because onto them I can project any number of gruesome scenarios.

Here, a woman unfortunately decides to reach under the lawnmower for her fallen wedding band. There, a man realizes too late that the uncaring escalator will not relinquish his dangling shoestrings. And my personal favorite is the baby born with an elongated head to a drug-addled mother, or maybe because of a rare genetic disorder. True, sometimes these ideas don’t exactly make sense, but they make for an interesting way to pass the time. When I’m at the museum, I can’t exactly share these thoughts, as it tends to place upon my listener’s face a look of harsh disapproval followed by a mellower but no less scathing glare of superiority. I’ve learned this time and again after mentioning to, say, the birdlike woman standing next to me, craning forward to investigate each ridge in the clay, or the frumpy professorial man running a hand through his thinning hair as he contemplates the artist’s intention in giving his subject only a top row of teeth.

Instead, I keep my thoughts to myself and try my best to fit in. Just as I would with Rusty, I might find myself staring down a Monet, my eyes held open to increase the chance of them watering. If I’m lucky, it’ll look like I’m crying, moved by the grace and beauty of something so wonderfully captured. If not, I’ll be seen as either the wide-eyed eccentric lost in his ruminations or the out-of-touch sociopath wrangling his twisted visions. Neither, I suppose, is that far off the mark, and they both beat out being viewed, simply, as stupid.

By the time we leave the museum, my compatriot and I, I’m usually feeling tired and weak. Not physically, but mentally, like I’ve spent hours trying to churn out plot points for an entire season of a soap opera. In a way, I guess it is sort of the same, and I have to wonder if that’s similar to what happens with my friends and all those other people who come to look at these pieces of art. Are the experiences they have with a horizontal mosaic of primary colors or a dark-hued portrait of a man dressed in a hooded white robe just their projections reflected back, not so different from me pushing tragedies onto arcane statues? Maybe so, I’ll think, but I’m always ready to move on, to stop thinking so hard. And in stepping out of that brightly lit building so full of creativity and introspection, I find myself wishing that, instead, we’d just gone to see a production of Hamlet, where I’ve almost learned exactly when to chuckle and when to cry.