Rural Life in the UP of Michigan Some stories about life on 160 rural acres in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

We just returned from spending 3 vacation weeks on the road. Our trip included Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York City. Most days were spent in museums, mostly art museums. We found we were good for about 4 hours before our brains froze over. Then we had to get back outside for a while.

After returning home, I wondered to myself, “Why do we do it?” What is the attraction to seeing all this art? We’re both trained in the sciences, so it isn’t about putting puzzle pieces into an already existing matrix of art information. It is all pretty new to us.

On the “science” side, the way we think in a physiological sense intrigues me. Our thoughts are neural networks inside our brains that need to be refreshed in order to stay active. But our lives when we are at home can get to be pretty routine, and so the networks outside our daily routine can get stale. I think that novel things in general, and art in particular, force our brains outside the routine corridors, and creates new ones, or refreshes older and less used ones.

This trip we spent one day at the Guggenheim in New York. This place is organized into galleries that contain their regular collection, and a large multi-floor spiral section that has traveling exhibitions. Our visit coincided with a large number of Orphism paintings. The work was highly abstract and many involved swirling kaleidoscopes of color. I gave up early on reading about the particular artists of the pieces I was viewing, and instead just stood before each piece and let my mind wander. I found that staring at the work allowed my mind to find a center of the piece, and on occasions I could enter the piece to the exclusion of the world around me. Then the thoughts started coming… things I hadn’t thought about for decades sometimes. Some pleasant, and some not so much.

Thinking about it later, I felt as though the art stimulated me to visit parts of my mind that I’d either not thought about in some time, or had intentionally walled off. Either way, I felt as though the works had done me some good. It is a good thing to stretch oneself within the bounds of a sane ecosystem. Poking around outside that area could have consequences, so that is the challenge: to stretch yourself while keeping things sane.