Cyndaquil

So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.

The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.

The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)

The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?

People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.

Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.

“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”

Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.

Watch: Terence Crutcher’s sister heartbreakingly defends him from police officer’s claim that he was a “bad dude.”

Moments before a Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer shot and killed Terence Crutcher, a police officer watching the scene from a helicopter remarked that Crutcher looked like a “bad dude.”

Crutcher, it would turn out, was unarmed. In the seconds before officer Betty Shelby opened fire, just before an officer said he looked like a “bad dude,” Crutcher had his hands up in the air — doing seemingly nothing to warrant aggression or insults from officers, based on videos released by police.

To Crutcher’s sister, Tiffany Crutcher, the “bad dude” remark seemed to be a sticking point while watching the videos in which her brother was killed.

“You all want to know who that big ‘bad dude’ was,” she said in a video published by Tulsa World. “That big ‘bad dude’ was my twin brother. That big ‘bad dude’ was a father. That big ‘bad dude’ was a son. That big ‘bad dude’ was enrolled at Tulsa Community College — just wanting to make us proud. That big ‘bad dude’ loved God. That big ‘bad dude’ was at church singing, with all his flaws, every week.”

She added, “That big ‘bad dude,’ his life mattered.”

Crutcher’s family wants criminal charges filed against Shelby, who shot and killed the unarmed 40-year-old.

Remember that when the first E. coli outbreak from the water popped up, the city hall was given water coolers by the state, free of charge, all while denying that the water could be unsafe to drink.

Remember that, despite having a huge budget surplus and a “rainy day fund,” set aside that could easily cover the cost of relocating the residents by buying their houses/paying their debt, or could cover a large chunk of the cost of replacing the pipes, the state has decided to continue to only put in the minimal amount of effort.

Remember that flint is majority POC, majority impoverished, and is still being faced with crippling water bills from the Detroit water supply company, where they are often charged $50 a month just to use the service, on top of the cost of their water bill.

Remember that there will now be an entire generation of children who will now be damaged by lead poisoning and damage from the multitude of neurotoxins.