"In this age, anything pretending to be even faintly original (or derivative with any sort of twist), should be considered art."
Thus spoke a reader of this Blog.
I probably agree. I certainly don't disagree. I was writing about my internal test that I put to works that I might consider art. This comment makes wonder if the reader has another standard for other ages. It also reminded me of an idyllic summer interlude around 1966.
I was married even though P. got out of going to Vietnam because of his injuries from a car accident. Previous to 1965, if you were in college, married or had kids, you didn't get drafted. So among our friends, there was a huge rush to the altar the day after college graduation. Gaps were dangerous. After that things got complicated. P. was having a rough go. His draft board was in New Haven, CT. The Yale students had scored big on avoiding the draft. Suddenly it wasn't so easy.
The war was already shameful. We already knew about napalm and agent orange and the Big Lies. Earlier on in the war, you could give pretty mild excuses and be given a deferment. It was no longer the case.
For his first appearance at the Draft Board, P. had taken a rather huge amount of amphetamines and gotten his heartbeat so whacked out that they recommended that he go straight to the hospital. He got six months until his next appearance and didn't get to sleep for days.
I might sound flippant when I speak of this. Some of the stories from the time seem like comedy. That was not the case.
There were two room mates from Yale who made a pact at graduation that they would hurt themselves to avoid the war. They went out in their car and picked up a little speed, and one shoved the other out of the car. He broke his shoulder and his arm. No Vietnam. His friend chickened out and got drafted and was killed his third day in SE Asia. Everyday we heard more such stories.
During the six month reprieve, we ended up hitch hiking from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco to join in the Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury. That's a long story for another day. We were in a terrible smash up right outside of San Francisco. P.'s head was smashed, his hip crushed, and more.
His father came to bring him home to Oregon and had to charter a plane to take him because no public transportation would let him on board. The draft from Connecticut arranged to have someone check him out in the hospital in Oregon because they didn't believe his story. He got out of the draft for good.
We got married anyway. And the summer after we were married we were in a rented farm in Pennsylvania having a bit of fun. There was a little bit of acid around and a tiny bit of hashish, and maybe a little bit of wine and certainly our room mate, Peter Fish, had a few martinis that summer.
We each had an art project going. Mine was my sun tan. I got a perfection never before and never since matched.
Peter was a handsome guy who looked like a cross between Jason Robarts and Franklin Roosevelt. He wore his Brooks Brothers striped shirt and bow tie. He had a huge old typewriter on a little wooden table under an apple tree in the orchard. He was working on The Great American Novel. He wrote like a maniac and laughed and read it aloud, and as each page was finished, he threw it up in the air and let it be carried off in the wind.
P. was making a huge sculpture. He had erected a mind boggling substructure of wood and chicken wire. He had deliveries made of copies of the Congressional Record. (there was some profound significance...you can guess) and was making a papier mache form over the chicken wire with flour, water and the paper. Every time it rained, his work was washed out.
I am pretty sure all three of us were making 'art'. None of our creations even began to withstand the test of time. Is it 'art' if the creator calls it such?
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