A View from the Gallery

In building a website for myself, I always envisioned an art gallery in digital form. White walls covered with ornate frames cycling through an indexed list of favorite paintings. This felt like an easy way to introduce someone to the things I valued or found interesting, that being the primary goal of this website.

But as I thought more, I realized galleries offer more than just aesthetic display. Rather, they force you to take on someone else's perspective. It's a condition of great art to require a shift in attention towards some ordinarily banal thing. You at least temporarily, have to suspend your opinions of how things should be in deference to the artist. Regardless of form, you're briefly accepting their assumptions for the nature of the physical world.

The most immediate conclusion in doing so is the gap between our assumptions and others. Individually, our preconceptions will treat our environment as we always have. Said differently, our perspective is cached, saved to make everyday decisions easier. In this static world, each opinion is implicitly preceded by always, whether it's our opinion of the bus as an unreliable form of transportation or a personal aversion to blueberries. This routine and static way of seeing can carry us through days and years consuming the world; taking in buildings, songs, and food as discrete, pre-packaged goods.

What we see through art and others perspectives is that everything was once an idea from fire hydrants to the mechanical pencil. From this stance, the world is malleable, movable even, solely limited by your capacity for ideas of which others have given so many great examples.