At a First Friday opening years ago, my youngest child paused to study a piece of art. Hinged double doors, it looked like a portal in the wall; you had to pull the wooden doors open to see the image behind.
His idyll lasted only a moment. Without pausing or asking, an artist I know opened the small doors while peering at us with a lingering smile. Behind the gateway was a painting or illustration of a nude or partially nude woman, I can't remember which, because what jarred me wasn't the image, but how the man's gesture undermined my son's chance to ponder the piece at his own pace, interpret the depth or dearth of meaning—and, indeed, to open the door himself.
There's no way of getting that moment back to extract the child's unadulterated impression.
I hold onto this memory like a worry stone, perhaps to remind me of the importance of having a sacred space to sit with an idea or complexity of emotions, to clearly see and comprehend them.
How else do you learn what's of worth and what's only a distraction? How else do you navigate a world of consumption where words like "value" and "worth" apply only to stock prices and commodities? How else do you learn who you are and what you want to be?
Years ago, I wrote about beer and art for the Anchorage Daily News. People would say, "Wow, a brewer and beer writer, now that's a job," and I agree, but when it came down to it, I preferred interviewing artists. It takes some descriptive mettle to describe beer after beer, but figuring out the tendrils of an artist's ideas, well, that tests the drive to dive in and take a stab at the undercurrents of meaning.
Looking at artwork that way begins with noting what's actually seen and then analyzing and evaluating form, mastery, execution. What is the artist trying to say? What caused the artist to say it? What's the context for the piece? How successful or important is the work?
The line of inquiry matters—what if we really looked at, analyzed and evaluated what's actually presented or proposed before every purchase we make, every business decision, every vote, every act of charity? What incorrect presumptions would we eliminate? What biased conclusions would we elude?
Discernment takes practice, of course. My kids and I got into the habit of practicing.
They grew up in two houses where both parents took them to art galleries and plays, folk concerts and dance recitals. With me, they got used to talking about plot logic and the meaning behind art materials. They grew accustomed to dissecting the violence in animated films, the corporatization of music, the heartless brush strokes of most hotel paintings.
They joined in carefully or absentmindedly—however their moods guided them—in breaking down the components of a film, poem, sculpture or performance piece to try to interpret it emotionally and intellectually, historically and viscerally.
Ingesting and digesting what you see, hear, touch and sense in a piece of art can sustain the heart and mind; it matters what you consume. It's easy to fill up on junk.
My big fat Oxford compact English dictionary, which requires a magnifying glass to read, defines discernment as intellectual perception. It's just about looking below and beyond the surface of things.
When I was in my early teens, a bit younger than my own kids now, my parents decided to start a weekly "family music night." It only lasted weeks, I bet, but it sticks as a communal memory. Substance abuse and loss had left its mark in our house by then, and sifting through vinyl seemed like a good way to reconnect. I don't know what music I played my night at the turntable, but I remember sitting on the living room carpet with my dad's albums splayed out—Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, the stray Lenny Bruce.
I was just another latchkey kid back then, prone to gobbling up what was spoon-fed by my peers and the media, but I caught a sigh of remorse after those family music nights ended. My dad played saxophone as a kid, but he pawned it off after my brothers and I were born. I never got to hear him play.
My kids wander their own paths and set their own standards. When asked what he remembers of art, my older boy mentions all the "Lord of the Flies" gatherings where he roamed the topography of the audacious, amazing and "Wait, you can do that?"
His younger brother finds little of importance in the art he sees these days, or so he says, but maybe that's indifference speaking. He, of all of us, will look closely at the threads, welds and brushstrokes of a piece, or the lines, sounds and white space within a poem.
A year ago, we pulled out the "should we see it" flow chart for a well-reviewed movie and he voted against it because it failed the Bechdel Test, a simple measure of the active presence of women in a film. (To pass the test, the film has to have two named women in it, who talk to each other about something besides a man.)
When standing before the double doors to art, culture, life, you can open them up or leave them be; you can jump through them or walk on by. It's hard to remember that with all the noise and meddling. It's hard to find a space for distinguishing what matters from the bright, loud, giant and popular.
This article appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of 61°North. Contact 61° editor Jamie Gonzales at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.