Just Because You Can Do It, Doesn't Make It Art

On Saturday we went to Salt Lake to go to the Temple and while we were there we went to the "U of U." We had heard they were going to have an Andy Warhol exhibit. It was a pretty interesting exhibit. I don't know how many of the pieces were the originals, but it was cool anyways. As I was sitting there, I thought of a famous line from Keats' poem Ode on a Grecian Urn where he says "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Certainly Warhol's work is not the most complicated or difficult to create. And who really cares about that? I was looking at another exhibit that showed some early Christian martyrs kneeling in final prayer in the Coliseum as the lions were brought in. Although the painting was a very lifelike rendering of the event, I don't think it was that quality that drew me in. It was the pathos, the feeling, that affected me. Isn't that what art is about? Art helps us to communicate the incommunicable. It carries the great messages of life. Like Keats' explained:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man,...


Some friends to man.

Its so easy, even an ERC can do it (Thanks eric, it you had been born about 70 years ago, I'm sure you would have taken his spot in history)