Back in the dot.com boom of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work for an IT company based in New York City. I was a remote worker, writing software eight hours a day in my spare bedroom in Gainesville, Florida. It was a win-win situation. I got to work from home, and my bosses got a good developer for country-boy wages (and I was still in the same time zone).
Occasionally they would fly me to the city for a meeting and I would spend my evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, which is surely the most beautiful and bewitching cities of the earth. My favorite spot is the Met. Like a lot of introverts, I love museums, and the Met is the greatest of them all. I mean, how many museums have their own Egyptian Temple? Indoors?
Once I spent an entire weekend roaming its halls, barely scratching the surface of its vast collections. I tend to gravitate toward the Modern period from the early- and mid-twentieth century. From guys like Matisse and Picasso all the way to Hopper and O’Keefe.
From a historical perspective, my interest stopped after that. I never much got the whole Post-Modern thing—Abstract Expressionism and all that. It seemed too theoretical. A joke that high-brow art critics had played on the rest of us, as Tom Wolfe wrote so wittily in The Painted Word.
But one day at the Met, I found myself lost in some nondescript portion of the building just as I became suddenly in need of a men’s room. I sprinted to the end of one of the long halls, found a secluded and pristine john, and I was A-okay. When I came out, I noticed a stairway at the end of the hall, leading up into what I presumed were the administrative offices of the museum. Being a particularly nosy nerd, I went the stairs and peeked down. To my amazement, there was a painting underneath the stairwell, right there on the wall, complete with a label and a pin-light and all the usual accessories. I laughed to myself. Yes, I thought, even the stairwells at the Met are adorned with art.
I rounded the base of the stairs and looked at the painting straight-on. And it hit me, the force of it. Like the shock-wave off a 747 with its wheels down. I stood there for what must have been ten minutes, just gaping, in thrall. After I had recovered, I walked closer. The label read: Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).
Of course, I had seen reproductions of Pollock’s work before. Their distinctive swirls and cascades of dripped paint have penetrated our national consciousness, to the point that they have become almost synonymous with “Modern Art”. But I had never seen an actual Pollock paint in person—in the flesh, almost—and I can barely describe the impact it made on me. I could literally feel some kind of vibration, as if the swirls and arcs and febrile waves of color were actually alive on the canvas, emitting some palpable energy into the cool, unnatural air of the museum.
There was no doubt in my mind; Pollock had somehow put his life force into those swirls. It was my first true inkling of the what the term “artistic genius” really means. I couldn’t describe it—I still can’t, not really—but I knew that this was it.
And something else happened to me that day. I was in my mid-thirties, married but as-yet childless, and spent my working life typing meaningless code into a plastic box. But in that moment, I became instantly aware that human beings have a higher purpose. More than that, even—we have a soul.
We are more than the sum of our physical parts (yes, even more than the sum of our neurons) just as a Pollock painting is more than the sum of its paint and canvas and frame. There is something about it that transcends space-and-time. And the same is true of us, too.
The definition of a successful work of art is that it allows us to connect that higher plane of our existence. There is no scientific explanation for this quality; it is a mystical truism. A bad painting, like a bad book or a bad poem or a bad movie, remains just a thing, an artifact. But a good work of art will come to life and lift the veil of our so-called reality. As Joseph Campbell famously said of ancient art work:
So that what you get in the [ancient art] traditions is this notion of identity behind the surface display of duality, identity behind it all. All of these are manifestations of the One. The one radiance shines through all things. The function of art, in a way, is to reveal through the object here the radiance, and that’s what you get when you see the beautiful organization of a fortunately composed work of art. You just say, aha. Somehow it speaks to the order in your own life. ‘This is a realization through art of the very thing that the religions are concerned to render.
I think Modern art, and especially abstract art, makes this connection even more immediate and undeniable. In a Pollock or a de Kooning or a Motherwell, there is no obvious representation of reality at all, no functional connection to what we think of as our daily existence. And yet it is our daily existence, stripped of its labels and concepts. When an interviewer once asked Pollock if his paintings were really about nature, he famously replied: “I am nature.”
We live in an age of so-called rationalism. I work with lots of young people, many of them just out of college, and I am often struck by how intelligent and socially progressive they are. And cynical. Incredibly cynical, almost to the point of nihilism. Something else strikes me, too—they are not a very happy lot.
Oh, they seem happy, on the surface, being constantly entertained by video games and movies and TV and, especially, by the profoundly misnamed “social media,” (which really fosters anti-social behavior, as far as I can tell).
But deep down, they are not happy. Their pessimism leaks out in off-hand comments, and also in their expressions when they stare into their computer screens.
And when I catch a kid in one of these moments, it’s all I can do to keep from shouting at them: Go look at a painting! Go look at a great painting! We have a fine museum right here in Gainesville. There’s nothing stopping you!
And that’s what I’m telling you now…
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 
