90. Patience For Art

The need to be patient with other people is clear. Human beings are not machines, and I cannot expect them to perform with the regularity and consistency of machines. They will occasionally do things I do not expect, and act in ways other than I think they ought to act. To demand anything like perfection from a human being would be absurd.

The need to be patient with an artwork is less obvious. An artwork seems like nothing more than an object that exists for me to enjoy. I feel it should do something for me immediately and if it does not then I will revoke my attention and focus on something else. I might even believe its value is determined solely by the degree of perfection it achieves.

But not only might the work be more complex than it first appears, it is also not simply an object. As the creation of a living human being, an artwork is also alive in its own way. The artist has given it a piece of real life with their own hands. It is this humanity that lives in the work that requires my patience.

I need to allow myself to see what the artwork is trying to say and do and be. This means I need to allow my first impressions to depart as quickly as they have arrived. I need to sit with the work and explore it. I need to take it in completely and allow it to work its way through me. I need to see its deviations from my expectations not as mistakes but as enormous benefits, as pathways to a new kind of beauty. I need to grapple with the work, to play with it and its possible meanings.

In practice, I might not have the time or energy to do all of this with every artwork I encounter. Even so, I do not have to make judgments about a work I have not fully appreciated. Not every artwork is for me in this particular moment. Perhaps I will rediscover it again many years later. And then, realizing I am finally ready, I will allow myself to patiently explore everything it has to offer.