Might I still argue that these are one
in the same? Looking specifically at
artists. Art isn’t history. It might hold
up a mirror, several mirrors, to a few
realities. Some might be conniving,
like those you’d find in old traveling
amusement parks, they’re made to
distort. But what is it that can be
seen within the glass, all out of
proportion, a movement away
from whatever is real? Perhaps
the only way to really know some
one, to know a person as much as
one can, is by way of those distortions,
through analyzing an artist’s intentional
diversions and purposeful sleight of hand,
not to mention their own misperceptions of
the world and of themselves as presented in
earnest. Even lifting a spyglass to someone’s
every move might provide much less than, say,
a caricature, a myth, an ideal. When one is
known more for their so-called flaws, or when
one goes down in books resoundingly a hero,
how far off we all must be. And yet, to know
a person. To accept what is impossible to know,
but to bathe in the knowing, to spend a lifetime
just to get at something of who one is, that
person closer to you than anyone will ever be.
