I am not a visual artist. I might have been oe a log time ago, but I’m not any more. I don’t do paintings or sculptures or anything like that. Well, maybe something like that, I painted a cross on my barn, it’s small, and I painted some words on the inside, and I made a sign for Abby’s garden. I think I did those things with the eye and intention of an artist, though I did them for an audience of fewer than a dozen people. 

The art I learned about in school is interesting because of the discourse it engages with and the art historical context of which it is a conscious part. There’s a lot to talk about there and a lot of people know and want to talk about it. I think that’s nice for them, that context opens the door and provides access to modes of thought and emotional resonance that more particular things don’t provide. 

The scissors hanging on the wall of my shop might seem like scissors to most people, but to me, they were Colin’s. His mother bought them for him in England and he threw them through a television screen after a months long heroin binge in the 1980s. They’re shears I’ve used since high school, and treasured. I had them sharpened at the hardware store down the street from my first apartment in Baltimore. When I told them not to polish them or clean them up when he sharpened them, the guy laughed “This ain’t a polishin’ business.”

The context I have access to while looking at these scissors is my life, my art history. That’s different, I guess, than art history itself, it’s less purposeful in many ways, but I find it more interesting. 

I’d rather have art on my walls that stirs me for reasons others could not even guess at and has no effect at them at all, precisely for those reasons. I think that’s part of why I love M*s so much, they are art accessible only by a vanishingly small minority of extraordinarily nerdy people. But that’s neither here no there. 

I think people should stop loving art that can be loved by anyone apart from them and people very close to them. I think the pursuit should be for singularity, specificity, iliquidity, the concrete and strange and one-of-one.

That’s part of what I’ll be thinking about this weekend while I spend time, for the second time, away from Roby and Abby. The home I am working to build for that little girl and the siblings she will hopefully, God willing, have one day, is meant to be a masterpiece made for an audience of perhaps half a dozen.

Sometimes I feel bad about spending my time on home maintenance and projects of that sort instead of writing a novel, something I could sell and gain renoun for. But, let’s think of a novel we really care about, that’s really influenced us. For me, Neuromancer has had quite and impact. Let’s imagine I could write a novel that influential to millions of people...which is far from realistic. Is that as valuable as even a 5% or 10% improvement to the artwork that is Roby’s childhood?

Of course having a famous multi-millionaire author for a dad would be something of an improvement, I think. I could buy her a jet ski.