(perforated lines -- you can't resist 'em)

 (mural of red)
-- Saturday, May 27, 2000 --

11:59 p.m. I can't help but notice that my readership numbers drop quite significantly on the weekends, and since this is a holiday weekend, it's positively echolalic around my part of the web. All this great and wonderful hand-crafted art, and there's nobody here to see it ... does that mean it doesn't exist? Or maybe it just doesn't matter?

This good-sized mural, rich in hue and careful in execution, was tucked into a little-used alleyway off just another side street in Venice, and therefore it's been seen by very few people, I'd presume. Whereas, that stupid Jack in the Box styrofoam-headed guy has probably been seen by millions and millions of people.

And which image is better?

Many people admire the sheer clout and power of money and success, and I suppose all that invisible working behind the scenes to create a household name is praiseworthy. Whole legions and troops of middle-management executives have fed their families and put their bright children through college by pushing Ronald McDonald and the Pep Boys into the national consciousness.

And when you think back on the huge e.coli scandal and tragedy at Jack in the Box, a snafu that killed quite a few innocent children, you can appreciate the thinking behind the ugly, stupid, horrific image of an antenna-topper man-head. Makes you forget about tainted meat and forces you to merely gape at the TV screen. And that is good.

Art in the nation's employ vs. art in a back alley. What endures? What matters?

In Turkey, the government is very close to flooding a newly uncovered city from Roman times, a city full of partially exposed frescoes and mosaic artwork to rival Pompeii. But the government has been churning and processing the paperwork, bureaucracy as unstoppable as an angry volcano, and in just a few months the new site will be under water forever.

There are so many forces, natural and man-made, that threaten to inundate the fragile scratchings of a single man, and sometimes time most powerful force of all is neglect.

Every time I think of working in a back alleyway day and night on a piece of art that no one will see, I think of the artist turning into pure spirit and vanishing in a puff a smoke before he can pack up his paints and trudge home. The art of the unknown is a contract between the artist and his maker, pure and simple. With nobody to pay, the art is a great gift.

Pure, and simple. And it's privilege to discover something you can't ever own.

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