Art sneaks into Polack's world

It's hard to be an artist in the modern age. For some, they might chuckle at the word. Artist?!? Are you kidding me?

It's curious to me how many people nowadays either 1) consider business, technology and science so important, that they couldn't care less about art, or 2) hardly have a relationship with art.

Buoyed by absorbing Your Brain on Art (2023) by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross as part of my school district's superintendent-led book club, I've brought art more into my life, and that's been a spectacular addition. 

One deep thought is how it behooves me to experience art in a nonjudgemental way. Just experience it. No need to judge.

For the longest time, I've been rating art. Which work is better than the next? What is your favorite? If you could have any painting in this museum, what would it be?

Although I sometimes still ask those silly questions, I've found it much more rewarding to just soak in art and see what I actually feel — and not think. The new approach has chilled me out, and not only that, I've been noticing more details — brilliant details — in art and the world that I used to disregard.

I consider this blog a borderline artistic endeavor, but I thought I should try doing something different artistically. Unfortunately, my skill level is exceptionally low in pretty much every discipline of art, so it wasn't easy to come up with a project.

Here's what I finally did: I printed 365 photos that are 4 inches by 4 inches and then put them together in a giant calendar for 2025. The pictures consist of people in the inner circle of my life, and I had the photos represent the days or things we actually did that day in the past 10 years.

I tailored "Points of Love," as I call it, to my beautiful wife, Dina, and gave it to her for her birthday. She says it is the best present she's ever received, and it's probably the best present I've ever given anybody. See the video below or here to check it the project.

The best, or worst, aspect of my project is that anybody, especially a child, could do it. It gave me a reason to go through photos in the mysterious cloud, and whenever things felt too tedious, I'd take a break.

Little discoveries poked through as I put together this project, such as how February and September seemed to have the least photos. That was a little peculiar, I felt, because of Valentine's Day and my birthday being in September, but that's how it is. December — fuhgeddaboudit — had the most photos, by far. Merry Christmas to you!

But, really, the project was all about the audience — Dina, and on some level, me, Sophie and Chloe. What an small, intimate crowd. I guess anybody who comes to my house is the audience as well, but, eh, why would they really care?

Dina and I celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary in three days and have been together for 10 years. That means she was here when the girls were 9 and 7. We've built quite a life together, and based on the photos in "Points of Love" and our feelings and opinions, we've been on a loving, meaningful ride.

I'm pretty sure a lot of us snap, snap, snap photos all the time, never to look at them ever again, let alone print them. I must say that it's a completely different animal to observe a printed photo than one on the phone or Interwebs. Plus, it's pretty freeing to do a project like "Points of Love," or this blog, that is not commercial whatsoever.

I've always had an affinity for art, and back in 2010, this blog announced that Claus Oldenburg edged Jasper Johns as the "Greatest Living Artist." The blog then compiled a Top 10 list of the "greatest living artists," which is ridiculous. However, it may not be that absurd because modern art is so commercial and such a spectacle, that making a David Letterman list might just fit with the landscape.

Since 2010, Oldenburg along with Christo and Lucian Freud have passed, but the other seven artists on my list still are living. And that includes Jasper Johns, who is 94.

It feels great to revisit art and forget about the commercial aspect of it, if that's possible. I just read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and I found some points meaningful, including how Rome is too touristy. And he was saying that back in 1903.

In Rilke's final letter, he concludes it by making a curious comment on art. He writes: "Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art — as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature."

Gosh, I imagine artist types have been forced into "unreal half-artistic professions" for centuries. But c'est la vie, to create art, or childlike poster-board projects, can be freeing.