"Poet as prophet."

I have an unusual series of photographs in my kitchen which always cause a stir with the dinner guests. The ruckus is over black and white photographs of urinals with multicolored fluids resting in the reservoirs. Distasteful? Alarming? Crisis-causing? Well, yes. Is it art? Well, that’s what the question always becomes and that question makes for a lively discussion at the dinner table—“What is art?”

If art is what you frame and put on the wall, it’s a tricky business denouncing my kitchen’s framed urinal motif. Art becomes little more than what inspired the photographs on my wall—a line from a Tom Stoppard character, Tristan, who defined art as “the right to urinate in different colors.” My photographs are a monument not to Tristan’s definition, but rather to a question Stoppard asks through another character, James. The question is not only perfect for the scene in Stoppard’s play, but would even be useful to ask in our own real, historical situation when it comes to art—“What do you mean?” James asks Tristan.

Meaning—does this work mean something? If so, what? Is there truth in this work? Is the truth conveyed in a beautiful way? I dare say that the two tend to go hand-in-hand. Art must please, just as it must speak and profess. The pleasure it emits, ultimately hearkens from the truth therein. There is nothing more attractive than truth, nothing more appealing than the search for it. Art-making and art-gazing becomes a magical adventure of divining and probing limitless depths with limited means. Artists take the finite to break into the infinite, allowing their work to be an indestructible portal of transcendence which once opened and unleashed calls to the world.

Yet, our society bombards us with images and works whose meaning is non-existent. The only meaning behind many works is the attempt to swindle you our of a dollar, not as a patron of the truth that you found in the work (mind you), but by the fact that the work made you think you needed something that you really did not. We call these works ‘advertisements.’ Worse yet is the work that the artist makes very unintentionally so that it may “speak for itself.” Artwork does not speak for itself. The artist and the truth embodied in the work (purposefully put there by the artist) is what speaks from the artwork—the work becomes an echo of the artist’s soul, the soul which amazingly heard a glimmer of the echo of Truth in the universe, thereby prompting the work. So, work is not art because of hopes it will one day say something. If it is made in silence, it will remain in silence. This silence has reached a deafening pitch in the modern world.

G. K. Chesterton wrote that “art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere.” Just as in morality, the line in art is drawn to mark the chasm that separates the Truth from falsehood. Art is neither flippant nor loose, it is a not an accident that a work captures soulful qualities. Artists do not often consider themselves ethicists, but in a world so confined to our senses and what others put in front of us, our lives cannot help but imitate art. As such artists must be assured of the task ahead of them—it is theirs to preside over the wedding of truth and beauty. This feast will be both public and effective. We must steer the world from unreality to reality by our craft, our art. Artists become, as Collingwood refers to them, “the poets as prophets.” They will "show men their own hearts" by offering them an encounter with truth and beauty. Their works will revive a fallen world by suggesting “the remedy which is the poem, itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.” This disease, I might add, began in a garden with a lie—a denial of truth, a denial of meaning.