Bus Stop Topics

Among the recent bus stop topics: Art isn't very interesting these days, is it? Following that, Covid has made a mess of everything and Is this what happens when you're in your fifties? Topics not of my raising, but offered up like a piñata, sans blindfold. (And no, I don't condone the masklessness above.)

Art is always interesting, isn't it? It is the is it and the isn't it that isn't very interesting, is it? Add-ons turn statements into questions and become conversations unto themselves, that don't require participation -- do they? Yes, art is always interesting, and what is most interesting lately is what we are willing -- and unwilling -- to settle for in an art experience. 

Last November the Vancouver Art Gallery announced an update on its design of the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts mall it is trying to build and one day move into. Gone is the wooden exterior, and in its place, a "copper-coloured metallic weave" arrived at in conjunction with representatives of the Lower Mainland's Coast Salish nations.

But why "copper-coloured" and not real copper, like the (painted-over) copper roof of the Hotel Vancouver? I want the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts to have a real copper exterior, and I want Teck Resources to pay for and maintain it. Mine the roof of the Hotel Vancouver, if you have to. That's what people want these days in an art experience -- they want the truth and they are willing to accept it in recycled form. So truth to materials, I say. Stop pretending something is what it isn't. We are living in a literal era; it is time we start reflecting that. 

As for Covid, have we assigned to it the appropriate metaphors? Just what is it if it is making "a mess of everything"? We are fond of saying Covid has highlighted the contradictions in the structure of our society, but as what? A spotlight? A magnifying glass? A pick axe hammering at fissures? Or is it a scrim that has made shadows of our lives? A restraint? A constraint? Is there a Zen approach to Covid? All religions ask us to take refuge in ourselves, swaddle ourselves in faith. Maybe that's what's inside that piñata.

Those born in my birth year are turning sixty now. Those born after February 5 are Water Tigers, and I am one of those, too. Looking back on my fifties is not something I have done much of, and won't likely do more of until the summer, when I turn sixty. But one thing I will say of that decade is that it is, perhaps even more so than my forties, the decade when I had the clearest idea of my adult life in relation to my parents when they were in their fifties. At least once a day I find myself counting backwards to compare what my parents were up to when they were fifty-nine. I have never felt closer to my parents than I have when in my fifties. Everything, as always, in relation?