Lee | The artist and the gallery

I’m a senior graduating with bachelor’s degrees in piano performance and computer science. I’ve written for Arts & Life (A&L) at The Daily on and off for four years, and I’ve served in the paper’s leadership since 2021. This column is about my experience as an artist and an art critic; it contains subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up.

— Pablo Picasso

The most frequent comment I get when playing gigs is this: “I wish I never stopped playing.” It breaks my heart every time. In that sentence I hear the joy of remembrance and the mourning of youth, the regret of losing passion to time. A person’s artistry almost always ages like fine wine; it’s a cruel irony that we have less and less time to hone it as we get older.

I used to think that performing classical music wasn’t art because it wasn’t original. Four years into a music degree, I can hear a pianist’s thoughts and emotions in the way they touch the keyboard. Art is a liquid, not a solid; it gains significance only when we — as artist or audience — breathe life and meaning into it. With enough experience, the breath imbues magic into our creations. With enough vigor, the magic may last well beyond our own lifetimes.

I shudder to think that my most artistically productive days are probably behind me. But I look back fondly on the galleries in which I hung my works, including the Arts & Life section of this paper, and I thank the members of the gallery who stopped for a second to step back and try to make sense of it.

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In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

— Anton Ego, “Ratatouille”

Music history educators love to introduce a composer with a negative piece of criticism directed toward them. One paper called Debussy’s “La Mer” “bizarre, incomprehensible and unperformable”; Decca Recording Company said of The Beatles before rejecting them, “We don’t like their sound and guitar music is on its way out.” The point is that criticism does not predict, much less dictate, reception. 

There are certainly thousands more examples of art critics praising artists who never reached the limelight. We do this a lot in A&L. Negative art criticism only has a handful of practical purposes, so we tend to limit it if at all possible. The fundamental principles behind the critical voice in A&L are twofold: establish credibility with readership as an independent voice and hold artistic institutions accountable. These pale in comparison, however, to A&L’s prime directive of spreading knowledge and love of the arts at Stanford.

I am fortunate never to have been the subject of my own critique in The Daily. My hope is that, through the convoluted clauses and peculiar word choice, my words helped you experience the art I described in new and interesting ways. And I’m sure Lang Lang didn’t read my piece anyways.

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If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

— Bo Burnham, “Make Happy”

It feels like we perform every day of our lives. You put on a voice to talk to a colleague or a friend of a friend. You curate a set of photos to post online to prove how well your life is going. Have your actions begun to diverge from your true nature, or do your actions define your true nature?

We live in an epidemic of performance and consumption. Everything, everywhere, all the time. We need more freedom to enjoy life unburdened, unscrutinized, unabashed. It starts with us: The audience has to become smaller, kinder and wiser. Take a moment to consider whether you need to be sitting in the gallery of someone else’s life or if you could find greater meaning elsewhere. 

Of all the lessons I’ve learned as an artist and art critic at Stanford, this is what I want to leave you with. You don’t need an audience to make great art. To have support is a wonderful thing — friends, family and teachers; readers, listeners and watchers — but it’s okay if your art makes just one person happy, and it’s okay if that person is you.

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