I do my best not to carp. Bemoaning minor irritants diverts energy from bewailing grave injustice. A pillow mosquito and the pillaging of our democracy are not equivalent complaints.
Whining indicts the whiner. Implicit in kvetching is a suggestion of superiority, that somehow I’ve been dissed by this disappointment and deserve better. The verb itself, “deserve,” gives me hives. “Use every man after his desert,” sneers Hamlet, “and who should ‘scape whipping?”
Sometimes, though, a small affront is symptomatic of more dire disease.
Visiting an unfamiliar city, Jane and I make time for the cultural highlights. This is impossible in a great metropolis like New York or Rome, but smaller cities present fewer boasts. In Pittsburgh, both the Andy Warhol Museum and the Frick House merit respectful attention, but today my fury – yes, fury – is reserved for the lobby of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History.
We knew in advance the art collection would be meager compared to several in Manhattan, including Mr. Frick’s splendiferous Fifth Avenue mansion. That’s a downside of the Internet; advance disclosure deflates surprise. Museums dangle their most tempting offerings online to entice visitors. Jane and I weren’t expecting awesome.
Or awful. The Museums’ soaring contemporary atrium was festooned with stories-long vertical banners proclaiming… what? Incredulous I clicked a snapshot: “I DEMAND THE MUSEUM TO WELCOME MY SMELL MY NOISE MY INADEQUACY MY STRUGGLE” Sic! Sick!
Was this a museum or a homeless shelter?
Slogans are slow guns, aimed at complacencies. If the curators’ intention was to gall, this one hit the bullseye. I’m all for inclusion – and against exclusion – but am I culpable for evading fetid bodies, groaners, self-haters, and agitators in pursuing loveliness? By the Nameless One’s measure, I’m woke; by this museum’s, fast asleep, villainously bourgeois, in my devotion to beauty.
Most art arises from and relies on the exploitation of the disadvantaged. To produce art is expensive; to purchase it demands superfluous means. Art is subsidized by the privileged to proclaim their prestige. The Pharaohs’ pyramids were built by the anonymous poor; likewise, Mr. Frick’s galleries. Social inequality, however despicable, seems a permanent feature of humanity. Much art deplores the cruelty of these disparities.
My dog-pal Henry and his species don’t need art to reconcile themselves to being. Whatever is is OK since there’s nowhere else. For humans, contentment is a casualty of curiosity. The more we explore being, the less sense it makes. Manmade beauty palliates mankind’s blatant absurdity. The effects of even the most moving art wear off, but temporary relief is still relief.
It’s OK to love art notwithstanding its origins. It’s even healthful. Beauty aspires to a more perfect world. Beauty enables us to envision goodness. That Mozart and Shakespeare existed is an argument for humanity, which too often seems a botch. It is OK to favor an atmosphere of cleanliness, civility, hush, in a temple to art. I no more want foul smells beside me gazing at a picture than I do listening to an opera. And this preference is just, right, no occasion for haughty rebuke. Contempt is contemptible, on either side of our nation’s spiritual divide. Even as we wage war for mastery of America, we must learn again to be one.
The picture I best remember from the Carnegie collection is the small Chardin still-life pictured above. A brownish jug rests on a brownish tablecloth against a brownish background; beside the jug three garlic cloves and a simple glass filled with water. The whole exudes hush, humility, serenity, gratitude for the beauty that abounds if we look.
To this I aspire.