Discovering the Secret of Art
There really is a secret of art. In fact there's a bunch of 'em. Trouble is they have a slippery habit of disappearing from your mind like misplaced little gems. All of us have to re-discover them. I just rediscovered one of them the other day and want to tell you about it. Years ago I came to a crisis in my Freshman year at Oberlin College. I'd been planning to become a sociology major and was hip deep in the middle of writing my first 20 page sociology paper. It hadn't been going well and one evening, in complete disgust, I threw down my pen and stomped off to the movies. I'd never gone to the theater alone before so it felt odd as I walked up to the little one screen theater in the town. As it turned out, they were showing a film where Charlton Heston played Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. As you might guess from that casting choice, it wasn't the most sensitive films on the question of how artists invent their art. At the film's clima