For Art's Sake

I remember how for a couple of weeks last summer, my Instagram feed was suffocating under the weight of the same, glittered background, with only the figure in the foreground allowing me to distinguish who I was even looking at.

You Are Here: Light, Color, and Sound Experiences, a sold-out event at both the Broad Museum in LA and The Met in New York, became the golden ticket for the metropolitan elite; the token of one’s true artistic interest. To attend was a privilege and the subsequent Instagram post, obligatory.

These trends, which are restricted to city dwellers with a monthly subscription to Paper Magazine, tend to come around as often as an Australian Instagram influencer releases an eight-week body guide. Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skulls, The Balenciaga Exhibition at the V&A, Brunch at Jack’s Wife Freda in Soho. If you didn’t go, you’re a fallen angel of the social scene…a ‘used to be.’ If you don’t use the condescending verbiage, “you probably just didn’t get it.” Do you even like art? Can’t find yourself or your lover within the colours and depths of the installation? Do you even have emotions?

The Light Exhibition is a goldmine for pretentious conversation, so on my arrival at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), I was fully expecting lines of Supreme-wearing, podcast-listening millennials to be waiting ahead of me, judging me for my awkward combination of Birkenstocks and sweatpants.

However, we were instead met by two older women who, if I had to guess, were somewhere in between their eighties and the back end of the Victorian Era. With no lines whatsoever, the women chattered away with us for a couple of minutes, admitting that they still didn’t understand how to scan tickets through the electronic device. Instead of being met with an ostentatious language I don’t speak nor understand – a language that popular culture has led me to believe is required – I was met by sweet, retired women looking to try something new.

Instead of traversing the awkward hallways of filled with silence and passive judgment, we felt open to laugh throughout the exhibition, talk and try out everything. At one point I even closed my eyes for more than twenty minutes to listen to forty speakers assembled to create a chamber chorus – each speaker blasting a unique voice.

Indeed, we snapped away (stories and all), but we had the freedom to do so without saying the word “suspended,” “creator” or any other douchey metaphor or analogy. I didn’t feel obliged to feel a certain way (or say I did when I didn’t) which has been the case with other in-vogue exhibitions I’ve visited.

It was just art.

I find it intriguing just how varied our perception of art is based on location and setting. In a sense, it makes me realise perhaps it is not the artist that’s pretentious, but it’s us the viewers. It isn’t the artist’s fault that we judge each other or that we create an uncomfortable and suffocating atmosphere.

We left the NCMA that day with the same photos of the light exhibition as everyone else. We also left with an entirely different experience; one where we could laugh and appreciate the art.

By Sophia Parvizi-Wayne

Duke Student, leader of national campaign on mental health, Cross Country All-ACC, fashion alchemist, Huffington Post writer, and all-around world-runner