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Art is saturated with the life of the artist. Yet unlike the physical body that the art manifests, an essentially timeless medium, the emotional innards fade with time.
To compose art is to condense one’s entire being into a medium, be it sound or canvas, brick wall or thin air. The artist assumes that observers, upon interacting with the medium, will somewhat comprehensively re-expand the work intact. The artist makes an assumption based upon their personal experience that the art itself will represent exactly what it is meant to represent: Soul, Skill, Technique, and Consciousness equally. The assumption is ill-made.
When an artist and observer share the greatest personal bond the depreciation is minimal. The observer of the art is able to accept, through their sheer connection with the artist, the most complete information possible from the art. This includes the soul and conscience, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. The observer is not actually the artist, and therefore some value is lost in translation. But nominal artistic loss notwithstanding, both the artist and the observer are satisfied with the product which has been translated. The artist feels a small stab of regret to know that even that tiny piece of soul lost would have increased the value of the art’s observation.
As the artist begins to share the work with those who are less akin, the soul of the art itself begins to fade away. From friends, on to acquaintances, through people who know them but whom they do not know personally, and finally to those who know absolutely nothing about the person of the artist; the soul of the work fades into black leaving observers only with the physical body, the medium itself, with which to judge its merits.
The life of the artist ends, along with those who were closest, less close, and foreign to them, leaving only the medium behind to recount that moment in time; the moment, dense and dripping with substance, which had inspired the work. It would be unfair to expect such strangers to recall the holistic structure of the work, and so we compromise: We, and in comparison even the most recognized of connoisseurs, settle on simply staring rather blankly at pretty pictures of landscapes and odd shapes, a canned fugue and printed verse, the technically-perfect pirouette and the crumbling façade. All these intensely personal perspectives through each looking-glass of the ever-tormented public eyes; distorted and vague and incomplete.
The irony is in the tragedy of it all, and the tragedy is ironic. We use art as an expression of ourselves, yet the part of the art which is yourself is the only part which truly depreciates with time; it dies with you and those closest to you, leaving a hollow shell of brute creation in its wake. The artist uses their art to transfer emotions onto the medium which tend to overwhelm the soul: pain, joy, empathy, terror, ecstasy, dread, life and death. It is their desperate attempt to reign upon an unbridled mind. Alas, in a fit of despair, the art will only ever stand in its full value, of its true quality, to that complex consciousness that originally manifested it: the artist.
