On Art
Or, how to support artists
The first piece of art I ever loved was The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí.
I must have been 12 or 13 when I first saw it.
And it stuck.
Why?
Well, I’m not entirely sure.
Maybe it was Dalí’s strange last name, or that outrageous mustache.
Maybe it was the melting clocks, speaking to my adolescent understanding that time was already slipping away from me.
Whatever the reason, the image stayed with me.
I’m even fairly certain I owned a print of it once—long since lost to the sands of time and too many moves to count.
But my love for art has always stayed with me.
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Art Chooses Us
To be clear - I am not an artist.
My friends would be quick to tell you so.
I cannot paint, dance, or draw, and my handwriting is nearly illegible.
But I can appreciate art.
The haunting voice of Chet Baker can reset my mood in a single song.
The striking work of Frida Kahlo—especially her mural collaborations with Diego Rivera, whom she married twice—never fails to move me.
Yet more than anything, I’ve come to see something both simple and profound:
Art chooses us.
This is both its beauty and its curse.
It speaks differently to each of us because we are all separate, yet the same.
A Roy Lichtenstein might seem to one person like nothing more than a comic panel enlarged, while another sees a sharp critique of consumer culture.
Dorothea Lange’s photographs, too, did more than document—they shattered illusions by showing the collapse of families from Oklahoma and Texas during the Great Depression, those “worst hard times”, as many would later come to call it.
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Art as Life
Seneca once wrote: “All art is but imitation of nature.”
He was pushing back against a Greek suspicion of art.
Plato, after all, had called it a “copy of a copy”—a shadow of reality.
But Seneca’s framing is more generous, and more profound: art does not deceive, it mirrors.
A sculptor carving marble is not inventing form from nothing, but discovering and shaping what already exists within nature’s patterns.
This places humility at the center of artistry.
We cannot improve on nature.
At best, we imitate it—sometimes crudely, sometimes beautifully.
But the source is always beyond us.
So when Seneca says art imitates nature, he means that all human making—painting, architecture, even philosophy—derives its form, beauty, and order from the cosmos itself.
Art succeeds when it reveals or harmonizes with that order.
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Local Art, Local Life
One of the great delights of my own life, in keeping with this harmony, is living next to an art gallery.
There, I’ve met people I would never have otherwise crossed paths with—and even come to call them friends.
They’ve broadened my vision, helping me see beauty in the everyday.
They’ve also challenged me, prodding me into conversations about society’s struggles, its vices, and its hopes.
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A Question (or two)
So the question for us is simple:
How are we appreciating art in our own lives?
And even more importantly:
To what ends are we willing to support local art—those women and men who shape the world even as they hold a mirror up to it?