by Athena Sharon
These Showcase Spotlights feature writing from the 2023 Fall Showcase Award recipients. To read more about Fall Showcase, and see all the students honored, head over to our blog post here. Athena Sharon received an award for Exemplary Writing in an Popular Genre for her piece “Art (Accompanied by Two Half Smoked Cigarettes).”
I’ll start off this introduction author’s note situation by imploring you to save it for once you’re done with this paper. Convoluted, I know, but what did you expect from a paper on modern art? So, read the paper, then come back. I’ll wait.
View the entire project here: “Art (Accompanied by Two Half Smoked Cigarettes)”
Now that you’re back, let’s continue. Assuming your integrity is sound, you’ve now read all 30 or so rambling pages dissecting the intricacies of the modern art world, and even the category of art as a whole. Hopefully you gained something along the way? I’ll assume that’s a yes for my ego’s sake. First off, you may be wondering why I urged you to wait until the end to read this. Well, full transparency, the paper relies a bit on you going in blind. I wanted to write somewhat of a defense of modern art, in-depth analysis, and unconventional beauty as a whole, but knew that wasn’t exactly great common ground to start on. I hope you understand, I had to lull you into a false sense of security with my seeming distaste of the genre to get you on board. But now for the long awaited explanation.
I decided to write about art because it has always been a massive part of my life and identity. For as long as I can remember I’ve doodled and colored and painted, and most of my family does as well. I chose specifically modern art due to my relationship to art as a whole. For a very long time I tortured myself in an attempt to make my art perfect. I applied that same perfectionism to everything about me; my appearance, my academic achievement, my creativity as a whole. I thought all art had to be perfect to be beautiful, and I wanted my life to be beautiful, so of course I had to be perfect. This way of being and thinking about the world led to an eating disorder that wrecked my life for the majority of my adolescence. Through recovering from my illness, I reframed my relationship to art and creativity. I began making art because it made me happy, reveling in the visible brushstrokes and mistakes I made along the way. It gave me, and still gives me, a sense of purpose and identity that perfection never could. I wanted to share this embracing of the imperfect through my essay, but in a more veiled way. This led to me deciding to write about modern art. Modern art encompasses everything I had to embrace in my recovery; vagueness requiring personal insight, glaring and often purposeful imperfection, and unconventionality. Through defending modern art, or at least increasing the reader’s appreciation of it, I hoped to defend alternative forms of beauty as a whole. In short, I wanted to fight against the idea of perfection as a prerequisite for beauty and meaning by choosing an imperfect subgenre of art; something we innately expect to be beautiful.
After going on this journey with me, through depressed anti-capitalist robots and activist candy piles and sideways urinals, I really only hope you take away two things. One, that only you get to decide what beauty and meaning is to you and how they show up in your life. Two, that there can be value in looking beyond the surface; in yourself, and in the world around you.
Athena Sharon (they/she) is a second-year psychology and criminology student with a jarring and newly discovered distaste for writing about themselves in the third person. In their free time, they like to play guitar, listen to any song with at least 6 distortion pedals, and engage in a variety of questionably artsy pursuits. These include but are not limited to: knitting, painting, rambling, collaging, poet-ing for lack of a better word with fitting syntax, thrifting, getting tattooed, a variety of other sound life decisions, you get the idea.