Life: Art and the rush

My sister is an artist. My father was an accomplished watercolor painter in his youth. My mother creates intensely beautiful quilts. Anyone who has read my poetry or seen my paintings immediately suggests that I was adopted.

The second great love of my life was (and is) an artist. Her art speaks of the need to reacknowledge the texture of life, a texture robbed from us in a life lived too hastily. Italian in heritage, she brings with her a bit of that Old World mentality of richness in life: the wealth of slow cooking, laughter, and discovering the huge wide world to be found in simple objects.

She has a show running now. I went. I brought my Iranian philosopher friend, Ali. We were alone as we walked through the gallery. It’s not the kind of art that hits you quickly, makes you say ‘wow!’ or ‘ah, ha….’ or smile or laugh or anything… quickly. The art is itself a wholesale attack on ‘quickly’.

I’m reminded that just yesterday I ran into a high school friend, Dan, at the University. He told me he’s working and going to school. I said I was in the MA Philosophy program. His eyes lit up, he said ‘wow, that’s great.’ I somehow don’t always think so. I should be in a Ph.D. program already, I should know more about what I want in life, I should be married, I should be working, I should have a 401K, I should this, I should that. But no; that is great. Dan and I agreed with a smile that education shouldn’t be rushed, perhaps half joking, perhaps only trying to make ourselves feel better for dissapointing a society that demands swift decisions in life. Perhaps, though, we were right.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t really understand a lot of art. Plato’s attack on art in the Republic made sense to me. But he was thinking of the perfect society, and we certainly don’t live in that today. Art has the power to effect us here, to tell us to “slow down, open your eyes, relax, reevaluate life, smile at the absurdity of it all, etc.”

My question is: can’t philosophy do all this and more? Or is art irreducible to philosophy because it has the power to unite body and mind in the experience of an object? (for my view, see a brief, old entry here)