And, What is Art, Exactly?

Maybe the goal is to live your art, all the time

Richard Wilson’s 20:50, installed at the old Saatchi Gallery in County Hall, London

This monthly missive is a way for me to make connections with people interested in art and creativity in order to inspire a more satisfying and thoughtful daily life. I'm an author and editor, always on the lookout for inspiration.

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The smell of engine oil was overpowering. I held my breath and walked further into the room. I did a double take: where was the floor? I couldn’t see it, even though I was standing on it.

To my right was an old clock, stopped. And then, right under it, another one. Stopped at the exact same time… but upside down.

That’s when I realized I was standing in a waist-high reservoir of sump oil, inside an almost hundred year old room with a submerged fireplace into which a clock was embedded. The second clock I was seeing was the first clock reflected in the oil.

The contrast was somehow shocking. The surface texture of the oil was so utterly… flat. Dark and glassy, like a deep brown mirror. Perfect. But my senses told me otherwise: it was oil, viscous and smelly.

An accidental stop along the river

During one of my many summer visits to my parents in London I’d been wandering along the Thames with my kids. Tired of pigeons and ice cream and people hawking Tower of London magnets, I spotted a sign hanging off an amazing building: “Saatchi Gallery.”

Saatchi Gallery? years earlier I’d interned for Saatchi & Saatchi in Paris and was intrigued. We entered.

The Saatchi Gallery was housed in Old London County Hall, a building opened by King George in 1922. For decades it had been used by the Greater London Council (a kind of workers union for Londoners I remembered well from my teenage years).

None of us has ever forgotten what we saw in those old rooms with their layers of matte paint and massive scrolled fireplace surrounds. It was “Modern Art,” in a truly unexpected setting.

Tracey Emin’s messy bed with its condom wrappers, tampons and trash, tucked into an old fashioned room with soaring ceilings and carved wooden moldings. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s installation of child mannequins with penis noses (that sure gave my kids some food for thought).

And the room full of oil.

Where do we draw the line between art and life?

I can’t tell you how often I’ve debated with my kids whether or not those various sculptures we saw that day were art, “art”, or just weird stuff for which people will pay an insane amount of money.

Over the decades I’ve thought of that 20:50 installation often. It made me consider contrasts and paradoxes: beauty and machines, modern and old, prosaic and elegiac — that, to me, is art. Something that makes you think, beyond the confines of what you’re actually seeing. Something that exerts an inordinate amount of influence over you, despite just being art (or “art”).

You can’t forget it. It’s exciting. It makes you think. That’s art.

Over the weekend I went to see the documentary Secret Mall Apartment. It’s about a group of eight artists from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who found a neglected space in the GIGANTIC Providence Mall and built an apartment there in which they ate, slept, watched TV and lived, on and off, for FOUR YEARS.

(Can I just say here how fun RISD seems? To be a young artist surrounded by other young artists making art?! Sign me up. Shame that you eventually have to grow up and actually make money so you can feed yourself.)

The secret apartment was more than just a prank—a space carved out of the most unlikely place you can think of just for the sake of rule-breaking: it became an art installation in and of itself.

I didn’t quite get this until about 1/3 of the way through the film when they showed some of the other work one of the artists, Michael Townsend (here on IG) was doing at the time. They showed images of life-sized figures he’d created that danced, reclined and crouched in a tight watery underpass beneath a bridge.

Hard to get to and hidden away, the point of that installation wasn’t to be seen and appreciated; for me, that was what made it strangely touching. It was a surprise to see those figures in that strange hidden space.

Until the secret mall apartment was discovered, it existed only for those eight people who built it and lived in it. Is that art? Is it only “art” now that there’s a film about it?

Michael makes the point in the film (as do the other artists talking about his influence on them) that he sees no real difference between life and art, to him they are one and the same. He lives his art, his art is his life. The point is the doing of it, creating art within a like-minded community for the purpose of exploring an idea with which he’s obsessed. The viewing or experiencing of it by others is an element of any creative endeavor but not the main point.

Hmmm.

What about novels?

Of course this got me thinking about my own work. What is the point of writing a novel if no one reads it? Is there one?

Of course there is. I’ve written before about the glory of flow, and the gift of designing your own PhD.

But it’s pretty tough to sink into the act of creation for its own sake, without craving the validation of the public to make it feel worthwhile. Because art is also about communication: if you’re ambitious or… well, human, you yearn for recognition, feedback, discussion.

Believe that anything can be an art project.

For the mall apartment to exist, it needed to be more than just a prank. Townsend and his compatriots believed in it as an extension of their artistic practices. Not only was it a place to plan their other works, among them a guerrilla 9/11 memorial at sites throughout New York City, but it also existed as an art object in itself. That’s one reasons it lasted so long. “I think there’s definitely a solid vein of intentionality that runs through the whole thing that added to its survivability because we’re taking it so seriously,” Townsend said.

How to Live in the Mall, The New York Times, March 29, 2025

Food for thought. The film is just the right distraction for these end of times.