Is art boring?

Is art boring?

It's an opinion I've held since 1998. Back then, I was a 3rd year student. The illest painter in the world. I still think I am. Even though I gave it up in my senior year. I told myself painting is antiquated and I developed a huge interest in interactive, computer and internet art. Soon enough I gave that up too. Art is boring. All of it. Looking at art most of the time, is so depressing. After you've seen the classics, it's almost never impressive. Or so I thought.

I had dinner last Friday with a young woman who held the opposite opinion of mine. She loves art. At first I was arrogant and thought that she was crazy. I didn't say that, but I thought it.

Art is boring, my mind held on.

Over the weekend, in between the busy madness that is my regular day, I dis-thought my stance on art using a foreign point of view. Her point of view. I remembered how exciting paint once was. I remembered how looking at painting was once so interesting, so wild on the mind. I remember the first time I saw a de Kooning, the hours I spent with a certain Picasso at the MOMA just before Y2K. I remember how I had stayed up all night reading about the early 1900's in Paris and being fascinated by the art world of yesterday. I remembered a time in my life when art was not boring.

Yesterday evening it hit me like cold rain on a hot day. Art is not boring. My opinion on art is boring. Perhaps I wasn't looking at it right, or not looking deep enough or maybe I have been seeing a lot of low quality art. Low quality art can be boring. But so can low quality music, as can low quality blockbuster movies. But how to make high quality art? Or where to see high quality art? What is quality art? The little answer I have, is right here.

"Art is -- among other things -- continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification." © Clement Greenberg

Janis, thanks for making me read that. Thank you for teaching me to paint.