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How long would you wait in line for your favorite piece of art?
This past weekend, I returned to a museum at 6 pm, 8 pm, 10 pm, 12 am, and then 7 am to score an art piece I longed for. At my university, there’s a program called Art to Live With in which people will wait in line for up to multiple days to put a piece of art in their dorm room.
For those who camp out in line days before, this may be a Picasso, a Murakami, or an Ernst. For me, though, who showed up a little after 6 pm and got the 94th spot, it meant that I could select a Kay Rosen piece (Oh, Eau), exploring the role of punctuation in its relation to text and meaning.
With such a low selection number (there were 140 pieces of art), I didn’t get attached to any one piece in particular. I knew I wouldn’t be bringing home my first choice. Oddly, though, the waiting and hard work only attributed more and more value to the nebulous piece of art work I would soon have my hands on.
It’s very human to create post hoc explanations of meaning. The harder we work for something, the more we will claim to value it. However, in the same vein, the more we value something, the harder we work for it. It creates a strange chicken and egg situation in which you aren’t sure what the true motives for your actions are, but there is something of interest: meaning emerges in action.
