John Cage – 4’33”

-Robert Rauschenberg.

It’s Friday, and my Outlook task list says that it’s that time again for a blog post. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy this week that I can’t even begin to mentally wrap my mind around what would be worth blogging about, a disease that I’m terming“writer’s blog”.

I wonder if the artists above suffered similarly.

Yann Tiersen – Naval

Yesterday was President’s Day. In honor of the day, I thought briefly to myself “Gee, I’m glad our President is hard at work today”, and then proceeded to enjoy a fantastic day that included, among other things, a trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or better known by locals as LACMA.

Now, when you walk into an art museum as utterly huge as LACMA, you are tempted to simply walk around, at a leisurely pace, taking in the paintings on the walls. Most folks, I observed, spent approximately 5 – 10 seconds at each particular piece before moving to the next one.

Yet,  when you do this (and believe me, I’ve done it), you find yourself very quickly suffering from visual ADD, as the museum suddenly become a checklist of token images to cross off, rather than a collection of pieces of expression, communication, and at times, beauty. I realized yesterday that to go through the museum at anything faster than a glacial pace would be analogous to purchasing a brand new CD, and only listening to the first 10 seconds of each track.

My experiment went something like this. Instead of walking from piece to piece, I decided to only take in one piece per room, a decision which allowed me to then stand in front of a piece for between 5 – 10 minutes.

The results? After getting over the initial “30 second hump” in which your mind says “Why are you still here….you’ve seen it all”, I started to notice more detail as it appeared in colors, shapes, themes, motifs, and after 5 – 10 minutes, even emotions.  Holy Bouncing Bananas Batman! This was amazing! For the rest of the afternoon, I really looked at perhaps 5 – 10 pieces in total, but those pieces were truly worth the trip there.

Do have patience, patience, patience, because when you do, absolutely amazing things can appear!