How does a garbage dump differ from a work of art? Why don't people admire it?

I live in a nice place. My windows overlook a small park adjacent to the city's beautiful embankment with a playground, tennis court and concrete tables where old people play checkers in the evenings, and the embankment continues from it to a huge suspension bridge, past viewing platforms where people sometimes stop when leaving the highway and look at dry cargo ships diverging in the distance. You should have seen this place under the snow — pure Brueghel. You don't even have to go there — you can just go and look out the window.

You need to go in the other direction — in the opposite direction, where the human embankment ends and the industrial one begins.

There is an abandoned park with pieces of an old wooden wharf, where the current carries garbage from the entire coastline. It is impossible to open it to the public, because the land there is saturated with toxic waste accumulated over the past decades, which will inevitably end up in the water again if the seabed is disturbed. It is adjacent to the environmental service station, where there is a parking lot for garbage trucks and a hangar serving them. There are long concrete beams from the last century, with tin brackets and pins still sticking out of them, pyramids of plastic traffic cones, blinking streetlights, huge mounds of tarpaulin-covered road salt, rows of tractor buckets, converging and diverging concrete blocks taller than a man, forming unusual corridors and nooks where, as if through loopholes, you can observe the absence of anything happening — only night, the hum of wires, sharp lighting lines and, if you are lucky, the arched back of through the service part of the raccoon.

In relation to artists, there is a stereotypical phrase — ” I see it that way.” I'm not sure anyone can see. Rather, there are people for whom seeing is a way of constantly seeking interaction with the world. When the world gives you a picture, you see the picture; when it gives you a dump, you see the dump. The ugly and ugly stops being something bad, and just becomes one of the many manifestations of everything around you — as strange and unfamiliar, and requiring some kind of its own approach, like the sea, the picture and everything else.

Why all people don't do it — for the same reason that some people are looking for new experiences and others aren't. Some people think that they have already seen everything, and others — that they do not need it. Both grow out of a person's strange assumption that nothing can happen to them anymore.

This is partly justified by the fact that we expect several different things from the picture and from the garbage dump, and if the requirements for the picture as a whole are quite high, then the average observer does not expect that the garbage dump can also give anything. I'm not saying she can. But that, too, must first be found out.

And don't take all this as a call for everyone to watch garbage dumps en masse at night. I myself would prefer that everyone reading this stop by the museum once again.

But after all, all this-lanterns, concrete blocks, buckets, beams-it's fucking beautiful. )

3 Answers

gleb_simonov says:

2022-05-11 at 12:58 am

I live in a nice place. My windows overlook a small park adjacent to the city's beautiful embankment with a playground, tennis court and concrete tables where old people play checkers in the evenings, and the embankment continues from it to a huge suspension bridge, past viewing platforms where people sometimes stop when leaving the highway and look at dry cargo ships diverging in the distance. You should have seen this place under the snow — pure Brueghel. You don't even have to go there — you can just go and look out the window.

You need to go in the other direction — in the opposite direction, where the human embankment ends and the industrial one begins.

There is an abandoned park with pieces of an old wooden wharf, where the current carries garbage from the entire coastline. It is impossible to open it to the public, because the land there is saturated with toxic waste accumulated over the past decades, which will inevitably end up in the water again if the seabed is disturbed. It is adjacent to the environmental service station, where there is a parking lot for garbage trucks and a hangar serving them. There are long concrete beams from the last century, with tin brackets and pins still sticking out of them, pyramids of plastic traffic cones, blinking streetlights, huge mounds of tarpaulin-covered road salt, rows of tractor buckets, converging and diverging concrete blocks taller than a man, forming unusual corridors and nooks where, as if through loopholes, you can observe the absence of anything happening — only night, the hum of wires, sharp lighting lines and, if you are lucky, the arched back of through the service part of the raccoon.

In relation to artists, there is a stereotypical phrase — ” I see it that way.” I'm not sure anyone can see. Rather, there are people for whom seeing is a way of constantly seeking interaction with the world. When the world gives you a picture, you see the picture; when it gives you a dump, you see the dump. The ugly and ugly stops being something bad, and just becomes one of the many manifestations of everything around you — as strange and unfamiliar, and requiring some kind of its own approach, like the sea, the picture and everything else.

Why all people don't do it — for the same reason that some people are looking for new experiences and others aren't. Some people think that they have already seen everything, and others — that they do not need it. Both grow out of a person's strange assumption that nothing can happen to them anymore.

This is partly justified by the fact that we expect several different things from the picture and from the garbage dump, and if the requirements for the picture as a whole are quite high, then the average observer does not expect that the garbage dump can also give anything. I'm not saying she can. But that, too, must first be found out.

And don't take all this as a call for everyone to watch garbage dumps en masse at night. I myself would prefer that everyone reading this stop by the museum once again.

But after all, all this-lanterns, concrete blocks, buckets, beams-it's fucking beautiful. )

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sergey_doshchenko says:

2022-05-11 at 1:23 am

I congratulate you, you have hit the very heart of the main human question: what is beauty, where does it come from, how to achieve it, where does it go, how to preserve it, and why there is ugliness, what is its role and purpose in life. Both of them exist, and you definitely need to understand this. The search for an answer to this question will lead you through such fascinating roads, paths and open spaces that I envy you. Enjoy exploring the essence of things.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/755KcDVPp5c?wmode=opaque

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lala_lala says:

2022-05-11 at 1:58 am

Well, let's start with the simplest thing-the garbage can is not located in a museum or in the gallery space.It sounds corny,but it is the location that initially sets the meaning of the object.You can also add that in the trash as such there is no meaning set by someone (except that everyone threw garbage there) and not just by someone, but by an “artist”.Moreover, the meaning can be either just a given meaning, or some kind of “manual” work, even if it's just a signature.

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How does a garbage dump differ from a work of art? Why don't people admire it?

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