Oh god... I wake up prematurely and I start to blog? I feel like that there is something wrong with that. Maybe there is, and that explains a lot. For whatever reason, I woke up at around seven this morning and just couldn't get back to sleep. Some general miasmic discontent surrounds me this past week for whatever reason. I find myself wishing often that I could simply stop my life from progressing and remain in one instantaneous moment forever, reliving one single day of happiness. I suppose that we're gifted with a memory to serve us with those moments when the proverbial "winter of our discontent" hits, but it's never as sweet.

Jesus, that sounds depressing. In lighter news, I've been considering the idea of narrative recently, and the relationship developed by the producer of a piece of art (writer, painter, musician, etc.) and the consumer (listener, viewer, reader). These two parties form a narrative between the two of them. The artist supplies stimulus, and the consumer adds in portions of his or her life in order to create a narrative unique to two of them.

I recently went to an exhibit at the Weissman art museum, and saw an exhibit called The Pedicord Apartments. It is a walk-in exhibit, in which you're literally walking through a six apartment corridor, complete with carpet and a spiderwebbing of tape over a hole in the window. As you walk past each door, labeled A-F, you can lean in and a recording will go off, either of a dog barking, a woman laughing, a Cowboys game, a party... things like that. While the stated purpose of the piece is an exercise in voyuerism, I found myself adding in my own story to answer some of the questions that came up for me. "Why is the dog barking? Is there no one at home to get the door?" "Why is woman laughing so manically and nonstop?" The consumer will create an answer to these questions, built of past experience in his or her life inevitably. Looking at any painting, the viewer will guess at what might be happening. "Why is the Mona Lisa smiling?"

Each article of art, therefore, is only half of what art is: a narrative. All art is storytelling, whether it tells an epic or just communicates a feeling. An artist is successful if he or she can anticipate the sensations that the viewer or reader or listener will add into the piece. This is why artists learn to anticipate prejudices.

That's about all I've got today. I still don't feel any better. What's the Stone Temple Pilots song? Big Empty? See you all soon.