Art and Life

One characteristic of art compared to "life" or "out there" is that a work of art has an end, a limit, a termination. Not so, life. Works of art and other kinds of representations have edges, boundaries, starting and stopping points that are more sharply defined and observed than any analogous transition points in "life out there." The defined edges enable the "rules" or protocols of the work to supersede other rules (no one really dies in a movie or play, for example, the artist's wife can have a green nose, and dragons breathe fire). Games are very similar to works of art and less so to "life out there," in large part because games have limits and boundaries within which game-rules apply (you can hit people in a game, e.g., but not in life under normal dispensations).

Paintings end at the frame or edge of the canvas. Where does your field of vision end? It's hard to say, because it's hard to look at the edge of you visual field. You cannot turn your eyes to see it—it just ends—and when you do turn your head or eyes, you see more. There is nothing more to the painting (except maybe for a half-inch or so that is covered by the frame, or a known or suspected fragment that long ago was cut off--but those are irrelevancies). Have you ever heard someone talk about a character in a novel or play as if there were more to the character's life than what was seen or read? That kind of speculation comes from the idea that there is much more to life, that life goes on, that there is something on the other side of the door or around the corner or next week. There is nothing like that in a work of art. If it's not there, well, it's not there.

Yes, yes. Cage's 4:33 and all that ambient sounds stuff, or the kinds of conceptual art that involve eliciting an on-going involvement of the audience (or non-maker) that appears to prolong the temporal and spatial boundaries of the work. But these kinds of works play at the edge between art and that other stuff.

Art ends, life doesn't. Vita brevis, ars longa is a nice advertising slogan by artist guilds and other proponents of the special, mystical, esoteric practice called art. Life goes on, it is the stream that is never the same. But David will always watch over Florence, holding his sling over his left shoulder.