There isn’t, you know.
Finals week is a weird sort of phenomenon. You know it’s coming, but it always seems to surprise you. I could have sworn that the semester only started a few weeks ago, but now it’s almost over and I’m running around, playing catch-up like my life depends on it. In a strange way, I suppose it does.
I woke up this morning to an e-mail from South African artist Willie Bester, in response to a question I’d asked him. That’s always a weird thing when you’re writing on contemporary artists–sometimes you can get things directly from the source, and for a second academic detachment goes right out the window as everything suddenly becomes extraordinarily real. The internet really is marvelous.
It took me a long time to find art history. Well, maybe not find it, maybe it just took me a long time to come to peace with it. I rallied hard against it throughout high school, resigned myself to it my freshman year of college, took a 400-level critical theory course the year after that, minored it when I transferred the first time and enrolled in the major program when I transferred to CSU. Maybe all of that time I spent being completely unable to graduate anywhere else was really just preparing me to do this. That would be romantic, if unlikely.
Art history keeps me up at night, sometimes. Last semester I traded hours and hours of sleep in favor of analyzing a lot of medieval Annunciation iconography. It wasn’t a very good trade, because I ended up not getting very far with the iconography and my kidneys weren’t very happy about my coffee consumption. I didn’t lose any sleep over Wegman, the topic of my other term paper, but it’s turned out that he’s cost me a lot of money–I found a book yesterday that I’d taken out of the local library for that paper. I’m just going to toss it in the outside book drop and run.
Thankfully, Willie Bester hasn’t made me lose sleep, nor has he cost me a large sum of money. He has, however, encouraged me to drink a lot of caffeinated beverages over the past few days, and I think my hands may be permanently cramped to fit the keyboard of my PowerBook.
You’d think that, after all this whining, I wouldn’t be excited over my summer internship at the museum–and you’d be completely wrong. Hours of researching and writing about 19th-20th century artwork? I’d better buy a bigger coffee mug.
