I got some peanut M&Ms out of the vending machine. Walking back to my studio, my ears were assaulted by the familiar sound of the fire alarm. 8:30pm is kind of late for a fire drill, and the voice over the loudspeaker sounded distinctly not robotic. Panic. Scrambling to evacuate, I grabbed my wallet and car keys just in case they didn’t let us back into the building, even though our class wasn’t supposed to end until 10pm.
Courageously, I continued eating peanut M&Ms as we all descended the three flights of stairs, passing through the lobby adjacent to the dance studio that was emitting a noxious smell, smoke, and gobs of water. Great gobs of water, I tell you, falling from the ceiling sprinklers and eventually making their way down to soak the entire lobby floor.
Now down to my last handful of peanut M&Ms, I moved with the rest of the crowd as we were directed across the street to, presumably, get out of the firefighters’ hair. One of my classmates asked for some of my peanut M&Ms and I graciously poured out two into their hand, both blue, though this is purely coincidence. Around the time the bag of peanut M&Ms was exhausted, we got word from our professor that class was canceled as the authorities in charge indicated the building would not open back up any time in the near future.
My main concern, as it can only be stated, was in the wellbeing of my own personal studio, which is on the fourth floor. It contains all of the artwork I’ve completed over the past year and some months in my graduate studies, and if it were to all go up in flames, or down in water, well…
That would not be good.
As I type this, it’s just about the time I would normally be getting home from my late night class, except for that I’ve already been home for a while and told two separate people the entire story as well as had many potato chips and one strawberry yogurt. The peanut M&Ms were not a nutritious enough dinner, on their own.
We were talking in class about the nature of the presence of art. If something is reproduced a million times, is it a million times less valuable? What is “value?” and how do we give it to art? If I publish my book, and it gets made into a bunch of prints, is it in any way diminished? Conversely, if my book gets completely destroyed in a fire and I am unable to recreate it, is it more valuable in the fleeting moment it existed? Talk about scarcity, I mean, if it only existed for as long as it took me to create it up until the day I was finishing up the last pages, and then was immediately destroyed, was it, in that one day, the most valuable piece of art I’ve ever created?
I personally don’t agree with the idea that scarcity equates value in art, and maybe you agree. But maybe you’d be surprised to find that’s not exactly the most popular opinion out there. How many people have told you something like, “That song used to be good, but now it’s just overplayed.” The song didn’t change at all; it’s still the same song you loved when you heard it for the first time. You’re the problem, or, more specifically, the number of times you’ve listened to it - voluntarily or not - is the problem.
If my book gets destroyed I don’t care how beautiful and poetic and fleeting and valuable it was. I think it would have been more valuable had it been made into tons of copies, distributed to anyone who was interested, and had a more permanent place in the world. But printmakers are told to destroy their plates after ten prints, and photographers are told to make no more than 200 editions of something or else it becomes “a collection” rather than an artwork, and we will never escape the grasping, clawing hands of graphic design.
If you only ever have one packet of peanut M&Ms in your life, are you experiencing the concept of peanut M&Ms in the best possible way?