High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city

I have gobbled a book down today, a recent autobiography, on and by someone I know quite well, well enough to have risked inclusion, which I’m glad to note did not happen. At one stage, the writer of this autobiography went off at a geographical tangent, citing his time in a windy and erudite city - which he hated - to the chilly north, a city I knew well, but one I did not know the writer knew. (Just goes to show how little I knew about him.) Anyway, autobiography is a powerful thing and must be told with an awareness of its irreversibility, I was reminded. Like fashion, it can risk later mockery. It must shine with a kind of factual enchantment, I believe, not dogma. This section of his book reminded me of exactly this. His criticism of the city smacked of ignorance. It also sent me right back there again and I suppose I must thank him for that. I was living there at a time before I met the artist and was a kind of loose semi-creative cannon rolling about the city’s deck, putting on shows, working at a theatre, reading poetry at nuclear power stations, and writing once with a kind of unusual innocence from a major war-zone. My girlfriend at the time went on to marry a man who later wrote a novel about this period, but for me the city has never been a page in a book. It is a breathing reality. It is a beautiful place and to some degree responsible for my appreciation of art. I had the privilege of being born by a roaring sea. The horizon held a large castle. The area was quiet, uncomplicated, and unexplored. As a result, it was not until I visited the city in question that I witnessed for the first time in my life such a concentration of good taste, exquisite design, architectural courage, and simple self-respect. It was untainted by too much authoritarianism, if you like, and good enough to drag an essentially provincial people onto an occasional world stage. Galleries were everywhere but by and large bursting with great but old art. There was one man, though, who had dedicated himself to ‘contemporarising’ this city’s love of art and I used to watch him in the corner of my eighteen-year-old eye: a short and intense man with a darting expression and hungry mind. Just hearing him extemporise about art sent me in a hurry, usually through a cold wind, to the nearest modern art gallery. And even if I did not quite understand the work, I would - thanks to this man - feel protective about it, fearful, in a way, of insular eyes. Of course, with this fairly young love of the arts came a love of the artist, too. A famous continental artist with a muscular past and ecologically sound future for example would visit the city regularly. People would wander up and down the many steps of the city, wearing a small badge declaring that the artist was back. But my friend’s book mentions the city in a way I don’t really recognise, reminding me again how dependent beauty is on the eye of the beholder. This goes one step further, too, and teaches us therefore that art is also about ourselves, not just the artist. It hunts us out, too, when it’s good, no matter how we feel, and exposes our strengths and weaknesses. No, art can be our autobiography as much as the artist's. Let us not put it down.