Investing in art is more than signing a check and displaying a piece of art in your home, office, or showplace. It is an investment in the innate desire of mankind to find within himself a love for something so indecipherable – like the fascination of two glaciers colliding in ten million years – yet so tangible and often insulting.
Yes, art is insulting. To purchase into the idea of letting someone else’s persona empty itself into your senses and to reside over your bed, your fireplace, your waking and dreaming thoughts, your prayers; to cleanse itself of sin and wipe that soil across your soul like a hamper spilling soot over rugs of virgin silk – it is the very thought of suicide, and that’s why it is so seductive and alluring.
Art is sexy, for it destroys perceptions like an estranged lover burrowing into your starving dreams, leaving you to thirst for reason and order in the morning hours of naked twilight.
Art is sexy because it is sex perfected – it IS the perfect sex, without genitals or aureoles, or hidden crevices starving for the slightest touch or kiss. It is the sex of hands slaving over primeval matter and transforming it into divine pretense. Because, like love, art is a vicious liar. And that’s why we love it. Because we catch it lying in the act and there’s no escape. We can accuse it of polygamy, heresy, murder, anything, and there’s no possible response that can trample us down.
Except the truth. And the truth is that art makes us feel love. But it can also make us feel weak. Nauseous. Paranoid. It can drive through our souls a poison that is far greater than any archer aimed at the planets in dire hope of scorching the heavens.
So why invest in it? Why invest in the horror of a Goya or the timidity of a Schiele or the murder in a Pollock, when they were young and unknown and hungry like today’s young, unknown, and hungry tremblers, tinkerers, and godless preachers? It is because it is the closest to heaven most any of us will come – to stand before the judges of humanity and stand naked, on trial, embarrassed and scorned, but yet miraculously cleansed by the heat of an open wound, escaping for the sake of escape.
Escape. Escape in the unknown. Escape in the vision. Escape in a stranger’s fist, following the lines in his palm down the rivers of time and soul and heartbeat, to the treasured womb of rebirth, redawn, and joy.