Tag: Art

Art Ideas

I wish I was a painter because I have the following ideas, which I think would best be conveyed via paint.

(1) The hugeness of a hug. Sometimes when I wrap my arms around you and you wrap yours around me everything that seemed to matter ceases to exist and all I know is you. This is assurance – love – happiness all wrapped up around me.

(2) The rigidness of my thinking at times. How painful it is to try opening my mind to new things. How terribly painful it is to admit my wrongs. To slow down. To be more considerate. I’ve spent many years rushing. Probably not really caring about the others in my life. It’s always been about me.

(3) The distance that can develop between two people who love each other. That feeling you get when you are only one cushion away, but it feels like a million miles. But never that simple. And you’re never sure which one of you is the one that is far away, so you blame it on them while trying to hard.

Law Art Show Idea

I have this idea for an art show based on the law. I would display in clearly legible printed text various clauses of the United States Constitution, statutes, and case law. The laws displayed would vary in their difficulty of interpretation. It gets tricky at this point. My initial thought was to have a pad of paper underneath each “law,” but I’ve since wanted the idea to be more dynamic. Merely obtaining the observers’ interpretations would be interesting, but implementing their take on the law would bring the event to life. Perhaps their interpretations could be entered into a computer program with an algorithm that would weight them and change the original law accordingly. Then, at the end of the event (if it were to have an end), a new constitution, set of statutes and case law opinions would be released. In a way, it would be a microcosm of what happens in the legal system everyday. (Except the interpretation would be left to the people and not to highly trained judges and lawyers.)

Two things inspired this idea. First is the method of approaching problems taught in law school. Seek the issue. Find relevant law if it exists. Apply the law. At times, the process is a routine application of pattern. I.e., does my problem fit within the grid of a problem that has previously been heard? Second is the fine line between “the absurd” and “the clearly logical” in many cases — and the application of logic to the absurd.

Thus two of the things I would hope to learn from the law-art interactive show would be what methods of interpretation did the viewers use and how did they apply logic to the absurd. Or, if they didn’t use logic, what drove their decision.