Lifted Pinkies

    The good news is, we discuss public art in my town.
    That's also the bad news.
    My town is a pretty place, by and large. The streets are clean, the shoulders mowed and trimmed. Plentiful parks are well kept.  A widespread tree canopy is valued in civic tradition and protected by local ordinance.
    In towns as in people, an essential regard for appearance is a virtue. You and I may differ on particulars. Our standards of fashion, decor and maintenance may not match. But below a certain threshold, a slob is a slob, an eyesore is an eyesore, and a dump is a dump.
    With an eye toward maintaining a pleasant community aspect, the government of my town uses  a fraction of its tax income to purchase works of art for display in public places. These objects are placed on major street corners, in parks and the medians of boulevards. One interesting set is spread along the right-of-way of a commuter rail line.
    Opinions of these selections are, of course, not unanimous. In my own view, some of them are fine indeed, and some look like the runner-up entries in a grammar school craft contest. Eye of the beholder, and all that. Overall, they are a valid investment of public money. They are a nice dash of seasoning in the quality of life hereabouts.
    From time to time, new purchases are announced. On these occasions, some taxpayers object to the selections with extra vigor.  Then, trouble begins. Then, the culture mavens emerge from their salons to scold the common folk. (In the squall of condescending cliches, one perennial and mystifying favorite is an assertion that "good" art should "provoke."  This standard does not distinguish, for me,  an experience of good art from an experience of interstate gridlock.)
    Let us leave to its perpetrators the odd notion that taxpayers should hot have -- or at least should not express -- opinions about the uses made of their money.  Consider instead the proposition that taste is the province of the refined few, who will let the rest of us know what should be admired.
     Taste prescribed by others is not taste at all but only conformity. We are allowed to have independent tastes, and in fact we do.  They may be refined by experience or education, but they are instilled by neither.  Our tastes are part of us.
    We all can cite examples that refute elitist stereotypes. Mine include a waterfront laborer whose knowledge and grasp of opera were stunning. One of my favorite paintings was done by an inmate of San Quentin's death row. A Midwestern undertaker wrote a book of essays in some of the most graceful prose I have ever read. ("The Undertaking: Life Studies from The Dismal Trade," by Thomas Lynch).
    Such examples hint at something essential in us.  We are makers and partakers of patterns and images, of poems and songs, of narratives that seek to explain the way things happen and the way things are. We want to apply from within ourselves some suggestion of order and sense to our existence.  We feel that we should, we feel that we can, and from the first time an image of a stag was painted on the wall  of a cave, we have always tried.
    Others bring to this idea far more than anecdotal evidence. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright is one. In the first pages of his multi-volume look at the concept of God as perceived through the Christian New Testament, he makes an interesting choice of foundation stones to lay down before his readers.  He does not begin with theological concepts. He beings with a detailed explication of the nature of storytelling: "Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life. ... Stories ... provide a vital framework for experiencing the world."
    On this point Bishop Wright's outlook was shared by American drama critic Walter Kerr. His 1962 book "The Decline of Pleasure" argued that the fine arts had been consigned to second-class citizenship in modern American culture. This he lamented as a fundamental loss. He said that music and art and literature emerge from -- and therefore speak to -- our human nature. If we diminish our regard for them, he said, we permit a part of ourselves to wither.
    In this view, Kerr wrote, the highest tastes can never be the province of the few.  They are inborn and personal:  "For taste is either personal (yours, mine, Henry's) or it does not exist. There is no chemical element in the universe that invariably produces it in a certain solution ... . Taste is never a law. It is always an entirely private love."
   So, for my own part, I will go on being glad that the leaders of my town buy us a little adornment from time to time. I will go on hoping they buy more of what I like and less of what I don't.  I will cling to the view that  beauty belongs to everyone, and that wonderful gems may be cut and polished for us by the ordinary people next door, to wit:  a passage from Kerr's book that he attributes to an unnamed columnist in an unnamed, small-town American newspaper:
    "Saw three birds abreast, wheeling leisurely in great circles, the movements of six wings synchronized and perfect ... as they momentarily held the morning sun and then winged away into the distance. .. Had I been an ornithologist, I would have identified these creatures on the wing by name, delved into their family tree, and explained something of their habits.  Seeing them in the eyes of a weather prophet, I might have announced them as omens of fair weather or of rain and related stories of the past that would prove my predictions.  As a philosopher perhaps I would see them as symbols of peace and harmony and would expound at length the examples that nature has set for mankind. Being none of these, I saw them only as three white birds in a morning sun and thought them beautiful."