An Unfortunate Triumph?

“All of the toy stores in the city have been closing recently”, the tour guide added. In clear confusion someone shouted from the back, asking why this could be.

The answer, which came not from the tour guide but from a tenured professor within the crowd, stung like cold feet on a wooden floor early in the morning.

“Because everyone is on their phones all the time. Kids have no interest in toys anymore.”

Could it be? By our praised progress; technological evolution; newfound convenience, we have created for ourselves a world in which entertainment defeats art. And the two are no longer synonymous.

There were twenty-some of us. [Public] university students.

Back in seventh and eighth grades, the analysis of art was an integral part of my private school curriculum. Our teacher would call on us, asking us what we saw in a painting, training our brains to make connections, to recognize the obvious and the secretive alike, and to appreciate the hours of thought that were contained within the thousands of brushstrokes on a once blank canvas.

As the minutes inched on, impatience roared. Eyes were gazed. Attention was dwindling. And there I stood, camera in hand, searching desperately for the details that no one else saw.

I’ve heard it many times. And when I fail to listen, the proof somehow screams at me anyway.

Art, literature, nature, and all that is beautiful is a reflection of something or someone who is greater still.

A painting cannot exist without an artist. A poem does not simply come to be on its own. There must be a poet who crafts the words and rhythm. An intelligent photograph does not create itself, nor can it exist without a photographer who understands light, who understands the subject enough to capture its beauty, who understand how to work a camera in the first place.

And when we, out of convenience or ignorant selfishness, care to look at art (literature, painting, photograph, drawing…) only for its surface value, as one does on a screen – while scrolling through, often in a mindless attempt to escape responsibility, we fail to recognize the meaning in ourselves.

Our innate beings are infinitely more complex than any idea within a novel, our lives significantly deeper than any moral of a painting or a Photograph.

We’ll return to the toy shop one day, soon I do hope. And there I anticipate we will see – not with dreary eyes, but with an enthusiasm and understanding – an understanding created by someone who understands our own thoughts far more than we do.