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Alex Gartelmann
Artist
In the early spring of my sophomore year at The University of the Arts, I took a trip to Boston to visit several of my high school friends who attend college there; my friends all go to school for something related to science or mathematics. On the Saturday of my trip, my friends and I decided to go the Museum of Fine Arts. Towards the end of our visit we ended up in the modern gallery. I noticed my friend Matt, who is a double major in engineering and chemistry at Northeastern University, in the rear of the gallery sitting on a bench closely studying a small Franz Kline painting. For a brief moment I was excited and surprised thinking that he was taking something away from the painting.
That excitement was quickly snuffed out when he turned to me and said, “I just don’t understand why this is in a museum, or how it is even considered art…” and continued with the clichéd conservative argument against abstract modern painting.
In an attempt to answer his question, I tried to give him a brief synopsis of art history to give the painting some context, which in the end did nothing to change his mind about it. Shortly after this we left the museum to go our separate ways for the rest of the afternoon, but decided we would meet later for dinner.
About four hours later, while we were eating, Matt turned to me out of nowhere and said, “That painting is still bothering me.”
I turned to him and said, “That’s why it’s in a museum.”
After a brief moment a look of understanding came over his face, and he said, “Ok, I can accept that.”
In this moment, the idea that an artist can affect that way that people think about and understand the world around them really hit home. It is not that I had never talked about art with my friends before, but when we did it was always in the context of what I was making. Of course they were always supportive, whether they understood it or not.
I always reflect on this as a point for me to make my work the best that it can be. Maybe one day, someone who would not give art any of their time could end up thinking about it for even a brief moment.
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