Just a thought on art…

Remember my pumpkin? The one I spent hours carving just a couple of weeks ago for Halloween? Well here he is this morning just before I scooped him up into a plastic bag and dropped him into the bin ready for the bin men to cart away. May he sleep in peace.

That’s the thing with vegetable art, it isn’t permanent. Not that I mind, I actually like the impermanence. That’s why I make my beach creatures. I spend hours making them only for them to be washed away by the next high tide. I don’t mind. You see, the fun is in the creating and not in the creation itself. Once it’s done, it’s done for me. I’m not saying that I don’t care if my work self destructs or disappears but maybe in many ways it’s better that it does.

I was once wandering around the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. They have a great collection of surrealist paintings, a Breugel, Van Goghs, all the Impressionists, Whistler, Warhol - everything really. I was standing looking at a Dali (‘agnostic symbol’- a strange, dark, painting of an elongated spoon) and the man standing next to me started telling his wife (probably his wife) that it was worth blah, blah, blah, million dollars. He then moved along to the next painting (an Ernst) and did the same, then the next (Tanguy. Yes, I was in the surrealist gallery – where else would I be?), then the next, and the next, and the next.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m not interested in the monetary value of a piece of art, but surely that isn’t the only way of judging its value - and who was that said ‘a man who knows the price of everything, knows the value of nothing’ – or at least words to that effect?

Maybe if all art was less permanent, more transient, made not to last and instead made to decompose, we might appreciate it for its real value rather than some dollar value that someone has somehow attached to it. I’m sure that Breugel didn’t paint ‘the fight between carnival and lent’ thinking that one day somebody would pay thirty million dollars for his picture.

Art is about more than money.

Just a thought, and probably not one that Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst would share.