Fake Art

I often think we know absolutely nothing about art. We understand the basic concept of art, but it seems impossibly foolish to attempt to justify, say, a fresco by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel or Bob Dylan’s, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”. Works like these, whose beauty send the most distinguished scholars running for their thesauruses, seem perfect, infallible, and completely enigmatic. But I think there is an equal struggle in attempting to define much simpler art. New Zealand poet, Fleur Adcock, poignantly says, “Art is whatever you choose to frame.” Should the artist decide to exhibit her shoe, a sandwich, or her pet dog, those objects somehow become art–the very idea of creating art is enough to qualify the end product as such. I decided to put Adcock’s theory to test. If art truly is whatever the artist chooses to frame, then how difficult could it be to become an artist? A couple months ago, I sent a poem entitled “Eating Congress” to The Blank Page, an up-andcoming student journal based out of University of Toronto. The poem I submitted is completely nonsensical. It’s just random words, some of which I don’t know the meaning of, arbitrarily thumbtacked together.

The poem begins: “Mama please don’t hunt me down, I’ll be back by winter’s end.”

I think I had been listening to Bob Dylan’s, “Mama, You Been on My Mind” and decided to address ‘Mama’ in the opening lines. But I don’t know who ‘Mama’ is, or where I’m going, or why I’m bothering to return by winter’s end. What happens next is more or less undecipherable. I use the word hubris at one point, though I’m not entirely sure what it means. I allude to big issues like capitalism and consumerism when at some point, Christmas happens, and the mood turns festive.

The poem ends: “The careful man with the elevator shoes Knows nothing of the sort He’s blue-green, sea bream Ancient desperate hollow And by tomorrow I’m afraid, I’ll be completely homeless.”

These lines certainly resemble poetry. They attempt, superficially, to poke at the same emotions as real poetry. But the only thing qualifying these lines as poetry is the group that chose to publish them. Sure, the editing process at The Blank Page likely isn’t as scrupulous as The New York Times, but someone (or some people) read this poem and decided it was art; ergo, I became an artist/ poet. After my poem was published, it was hard to resist indulging in the luxuries that, in my mind, accompany a moniker as fancy as “poet”. I spent money like an aristocrat, donned a fur coat, carried a tobacco pipe, advocated passionately for world peace, and argued with my contemporaries over Twain’s use of the Oxford Comma–the whole gamut. That aside, there is one aspect of this case study I find particularly disturbing. I can’t help but feel a poem like this would be capable of penetrating the precincts of a high school literature course. Surely, you could write a few thousand words on the images and themes the author depicts in this poem. What does it mean to be completely homeless? What point do you think the author is making about unfettered North American capitalism? How is the author’s rather pessimistic tone similar to George Orwell’s in 1984? I recognize this case study is likely incapable of accepting or refuting Adcock’s theory. But it does shed light on an artistic phenomenon largely ignored in the classroom: the utterly unintellectual notion that an artist’s motives might be totally arbitrary. In fact, there’s something particularly satisfying about having your peers quibble over the meaning of a poem, a bad poem, that was intended to be meaningless. I reckon some of our favourite artists, poets, and musicians must, at times, feel the same way. Perhaps, like beauty, art is in the eye of the beholder, and it is through our appreciation of creative works that art comes to exist.

by Jonah Prousky