You can just do things
Plus, what’s going on with the Venice Biennale.
I approach my birthday with trepidation, not out of self-hatred or any particular loathing for aging—a gift—but because it is easy to feel that with each solar return, everything stays the same and little changes. It is easier for me to understand that the way that I spend my days is the way that I spend my life, rather than reflecting on the culmination of those days and how the inputs registered on each one compound upon one another, rather than simply adding up. This is all to say that today is my 32nd birthday, and these are the things I am feeling.
I am familiar with the slowness of progress. Growing up studying ballet intensively, you can only understand how to be a little bit better every day, rather than leaping—jeté-ing, maybe—from one milestone to the next. Art requires practice and comfort with the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be next. It requires sitting with the discomfort that comes with recognizing your taste and comparing it, with harrowing realization, with your abilities. It necessitates showing up anyway.
It seems to me that a lot of people divorce themselves from the arts because they do require this degree of patience, not only to perform oneself, but to appreciate them. It is only through time and some level of study or exploration that one begins to make sense of what’s in front of them. You can surely enjoy Coppélia or La Bohème or a Strauss waltz without knowledge of ballet, opera, or classical music, just as you can admire a painting by Monet or Manet without having taken Art History 101. I don’t necessarily want to say that your enjoyment, specifically, will grow with a greater level of context, but it will give you new angles and perspectives from which you can consider and reconsider such works. To some extent, it can feel like having to earn it.
And that can be understandably tedious—to have to put in some level of “work” to eke pleasure out of something which heretofore may seem illegible, when easier delights are always within reach, behind the screen, of course, but also in other venues: a sports game* or comedy show or, I don’t know, a Broadway adaptation of a Disney movie. (*I will admit, though, as someone whose fantasy football team, the Prima Donnas, came in second-to-last in the league, that there is greater enjoyment in the game when you know what is going on.)
The pleasure comes from the realization—often sudden or at least unanticipated—that your repeated exposure to something brings depth and dimension to your experience of it. For better or worse, it’s not a process that can be speed-run (there are no growth hacks for one’s cultural comprehension) nor is it one that can be cheated. It only comes with age.
That said, you do have to make a choice: to take a step farther, and, potentially, ease into something that’s a touch out of your debt. I’ve come around to 32 feeling like not that much has changed in my life, but this is also true: before I was 31, I was not a professionally published dance critic. Now, I review several shows a month.
You can just do things—and to move into a place where you haven’t been before, you have no choice but to do them. The discomfort (and so often, in my case, self-doubt and intimidation) that comes with trying something new is the price of growth.
The biggest news in the art world is that the jury for the Venice Biennale has collectively resigned after backlash to its decision to prohibit artists from Russia and Israel, whose leaders are accused of war crimes by the ICC, from winning any of the art fair’s Golden Lion awards. Instead, the public will vote on “Visitor Lions,” for which all participating artists will be eligible. The voting period will run for the length of the entire Biennale, which opens Saturday and closes November 22.
