Recently, I made a trip to a couple of art museums in my area. I saw an exhibit on the "Posters of Paris", collections of really old stuff, and collections of some fairly new stuff. It was pretty amazing.
One thing that really impressed me about the posters (aside from the fact that they were once haphazardly displayed on Parisian streets) is that they were color lithographs, AKA prints on prints on prints. I could barely make a print with one color in my eight grade art class; I can't imagine layering different colors with different patterns on one space, and getting everything to line up perfectly and blend right. As a person with self-diagnosed artistic OCD, that sounds like the ultimate nightmare.
Even more impressive than the immaculate construction of the pieces, however, was the feeling that they conveyed. In some cases, I enjoyed the artists' painted rough drafts more than the finished prints. There was something in them that conveyed movement and made the scenes seem very real. I felt like I was in Paris, taken back in time.
I was transported even farther back when I went through the regular exhibits. A friend of mine commented, "You can't even fathom how old this stuff is". She was completely right. How could we, people of the 21st century, understand what it was like when a pot was made and painted in ancient Greece? How could we envision what life was like when the pyramids were first being built and tombs were being filled in Egypt? We will never be able to fully understand what it was like to live and breathe back then, to think and feel as an ancient Greek or Egyptian. At least their artwork lives to tell part of their story.
As I progressed through the rest of the exhibits and then went to a more modern museum, I saw time catching up to me in art form. From portraits of important people, to pieces of rustic furniture, to abstract sculptures and socially conscious folk art, people have been recording important parts of their lives for centuries and will probably (and hopefully) continue to do so for centuries to come.
It makes me wonder what my generation will present as our defining artifacts. Computers? Cell phones? Will someone be digging around in the dirt a thousand years from now and find an iPad? I guess that would be pretty cool. Or will people just be able to use a computer to look up all the awesome stuff we made? I guess that would be pretty cool, too. Still, I hope someone digs something of mine out of the ground and puts it in a museum someday. I hope they can touch what I touched and wonder about what I thought and felt. And I hope they still enjoy the old Greek pots and Posters of Paris.
