One year ago on my birthday I tried to define “art” for Carter Ratcliff’s guest editorship of The Brooklyn Rail “What is Art—Why Even Ask?” On this birthday morning I’ll add a few more points:

 

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I’m in my blue period, which means all my clothes are blue and I think about “blueness”. Which is not to say I’m sad—there is an entire emotional spectrum within “blues”.

 

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Color is contingent on time, space, and feeling. I have a mental catalog of colors encountered on particular surfaces, in certain places, at exact times of day, during different emotional situations—the real specifics of color are almost infinite.

 

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I’ve been thinking about feelings, as in this passage from “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”:

 

“But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate looked impish— demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of things. But the essence of things had changed.”

 

Art seems more about these essences than substances; or rather, I am interested in how the essence of material things changes in our perceptions because of our feelings.

 

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Watching Nina Simone sing “Feelings” live in Montreux 1976, over and over again: the empty lyrics that become flooded by the intensity of her performance, which is incandescent, oppositional; she antagonizes the audience as a way of wanting them closer—a desire to be feeling together.

 

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The most important and embattled quality now is imagination. So much current art fails to imagine any new way of being in the world; instead it settles for exploiting the way things are.

 

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Writing about art, like making it, means being concerned with every aspect of that human life; no feeling is beneath its dignity and no experience irrelevant.

 

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Jarrett Earnest
New York
13 August 2014