Should art ultimately bring happiness, laughter to its perceiver? Or can we also say it did its work if it brought sadness or anger? I know this is such a cheesy group of questions, but allow me to continue.
So there is this national art university in this de-facto capital city of this one industrialized, far-east, island nation, and on its campus there is this room where you can find all of the clean but now dated paper objects from around the school, compiled together and waiting to be transported away and transformed: the oldest, soon-to-be forgotten memories becoming food for the industrial process of creating the newest but now completely empty sheets of paper. I recall having so much love for this room when I go and find the warmth of bygone yet golden dreams, logs of travel to places I’ve never been, just some notes by strangers, whose physical presence will probably be lost but at least its memories etched in my mind. Meanwhile it occasionally gave me fears about how chilling people can be, especially when right after the end of a school year or the term of some higher-up in the school, you would find carefully crafted gifts to the university just messily thrown away. The most painful memory was when I found editioned, original prints, which were artworks by a fellow student of mine, along with it a letter addressed to the artist’s teacher,a name I know because it just became that of the president of the university, all just tossed in a random paper bag, and left there to be taken away. I think of the student, of the effort that must have been put into these works, the expected response, whether it be appraisal or constructive criticism, from the teacher. I think of the student’s family, how proud they must have been for their child to enter this school. They both must have never expected for that school’s president to just outright dispose a student’s work into the trash. Well, maybe the president’s job is about thinking about, I don't know, how they are trending on YouTube. Or more pressing matters. Like money. Like the war. Like, people actually living and dying. But for me, my only thought right now is about the life and death of this one student’s work, how its physical presence is probably now some recycled pulp.
So did this art, do its work, even though it brought sadness and anger to me, not happiness or laughter to whom it was originally addressed to?
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