Hi, All!
A new week is upon us, and my poor brain is a-whirl with the possibilities! Or, maybe I’m just dizzy . . . sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I went to the Indiana State Fair yesterday, and I marched around for about six hours with a Johnny Saturn t-shirt on. This might have once seemed a bit odd to me, but then I saw a multitude of people wearing shirts with Batman or Superman or Green Lantern emblems, and a host of other DC or Marvel licensed likenesses. Well, I had Johnny Saturn on, so I get all the cool, Indie cred!
There were a lot of groups displaying what they do and how to join them in the “Our Land” building: “Our Land,” of course, meant “Indiana” in this context. I was less than delighted to find they had cockroach racing, live veterinarian demonstrations neutering live animals, and some crazy sculptor making a two-ton cheese sculpture. At first, I wondered why the Indiana Web Cartoonists didn’t have a table there, but then I figured they couldn’t possibly compete with live operations on a dog. (No, I did not stay and watch the operation. Once the vet drew an incision line on the dog’s shaved belly, I was out of there!). I can also say that I was uncomfortable with the wastefulness of the ridiculous cheese sculpture, even though the artist claimed that it would all be re-processed as a binding agent for animal feed.
Anyway, Benita and friend Sandy sat spinning and promoting the benefits of the fiber arts in the “Our Land” pavilion for four hours. They had good crowds, and educated the public on what they were doing. Modern people are a long way from the farm, and seeing people spinning, weaving, or practicing any of the other traditional crafts is a new experience to them. According to Benita, one fellow didn’t know what a sheep looked like, and attempts to tell him simply further confused the matter.
In the Family Arts Building, I had the chance to wonder through the art entries at leisure. It seemed that a reasonably large percentage of these works were done by artists associated with the Indianapolis Art Center, and I recognized many of the names of people I knew as well as many of the models I had often drawn in the pictures themselves. It had never occurred to me to enter work in the state fair, but apparently I was somewhat unique in that oversight. Still, because of the subjected nature of judging this type of event, it seemed that many works of stunning beauty or powerful artistic statement were overlooked. I guess this is how it often is, but still…
Yet, I wonder, isn’t that subjective nature representative of the artist’s life? Once we put our work out in the public eye, we can’t control how the public perceives it, or what it does or does not mean to them. There’s some deeper wisdom to found in this observation, I’m sure of it, but it escapes me at the moment.
Scott.
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