No such thing

Two things:
Rothko installation at the Tate Gallery
and
My Valuable Hunting Knife

For some reason blogger wants this to be italicized. Please excuse the urgent-looking type.

My Valuable Hunting Knife is a song with a video by Guided by Voices. In it a number of things are held and displayed. They look like things that would have been hard to part with at one point. They could be things that people fought over. But at some point, such objects fall out of favor.

In the Rothko exhibit it's the opposite. Interpretation has fallen out of favor. There's a fatigue around the spiritual, ineffable artwork. Or maybe, rather, we're more game than ever to talk about things that once had no handles to latch onto. Radical art doesn't give indications about how to respond to it - it's just an experience. Talking about experience leads to questions about existence and that leads to mystery. Now, as a species, we've experienced mystery and Rothko is material stuff. We've had our hands on transient things, but physical constructions of pigment and canvas and wood and metal demand that we square with them as phsyical things that have duration. Maybe we've traded places with art and we're now able to notice how temporary we are; the fleeting nature of technology is an extension of us.