The Land of the Unicorns

   As I rode the elevator back down to street level I marveled at how normal it had all become. Clutching an illustration I’d retrieved from a prestigious Midtown gallery I’d once pestered for two years just to give my work a glance. I’d wanted it back, they shrugged and slid it from the shelf in the back. Racks of historic and contemporary oil paintings sheathed in bubble wrap. A hidden visual library worth millions. I wanted mine for another show across town.

   That morning I’d written an essay for a documentary film crew that spotlights artists’ careers, drawn, and applied to three separate jobs with the shared title of “Concrete Laborer 1”. I listened to the rattle of the hammer drill melting away a cracked sidewalk slated for rebirth and wondered at the status of my applications. My Osha card was up to date, no injuries from the last job, I was ready to work. The crosswalk switched, and I flowed with the crowd back toward the N train.

   And as I crossed the avenue, glancing down the chasm of ornate stone and cold glass, it dawned on me that I’d become one of them. A unicorn. The infiltration was complete. Born of a cartoonish understanding of what being a fancy artist meant, my mission to understand and enter this hidden world had seamlessly come to fruition. Not by any loud bang, but through 2000 days of tiny effort, each one layering the last, burying my past and rising the ground beneath my feet toward this amorphous goal. I had found the land of the unicorns, and become one.

   That’s how I see “The Art World”, as if it exists anywhere else. This opaque industry of curators, collectors, galleries, fairs, the whole insular cosmos of “Fine Art” was new to me. The operators in this bizarre arena may as well have been cryptids. I knew they were out there, and I knew they were human, I just needed to understand the steps they took to enter into this secret club. I had to learn everything along the way. Illuminating each puzzle piece at a time, the configuration of which still and always will baffle me.

   What made me a unicorn, an interloper and fellow dweller of this magical plane, was not some revelation. I was not ceremonially inducted into this. I was not given some mystical schematic that would make all of this make sense. It was the fact that I had let this start to seem normal. Little by little, bit by bit.

   But it’s not normal. This delegated space for art, separate and apart from the regular world was created. It has a history and an origin that can be traced. It is not a natural conclusion. Its validity, like the validity of all of societal norms and behaviors, is propped up by a cloud of human imagination. And limited by it. Ironic.

   Art was not the thing I needed to discover, it was the art world. Art has accompanied me along this whole journey. From the dreamlike flashes of my earliest memories to the quiet moment of awe I felt gazing across the East River today. The feeling is nothing new. Art is like an invisible plane layered over our lives. When present, the mind reels, the blood flows and senses heighten. An energetic field encompassing the moment. Works of art are merely products of this invisible force. Artists are the conduits. And yet, we’ve allowed the very power that has elevated our species above nature itself to be flattened so crudely. Creativity, our superpower, condensed into a mere skill. And worse yet, evaluated through a monetary lens.

   So here I found myself, half in, half out. Respected. Broke. An artist who’d spent the past 6 years studying the art world and its modus operandi but never shedding an ounce of imagination on wondering what other form it may take someday. Why was I tailoring my artistic outreach to this system of gallery approval? My art style didn’t pander, I had always followed my gut there. So why would I take for granted anyone else’s definition of the world?

   I picture the art world as a giant shimmering dome of reflective mercury. The mirrored quicksilver shielding its secret core with a wall of reflection. The art world reflecting all of the beauty and horror of the earth. Along its impassible face all the vices and virtues of humanity gleam back at the onlooking masses, especially greed. But now I find myself on the inside of this great bubble, and I find myself feeling the same disorienting revelation that many do at this moment in history. The post conspiratorial hangover that kicks in when we realize that the world is shaped not by omniscient geniuses with some grand design, but by powerful, limited people. The levers of power are operated by flawed, perfectly average people. People who act without analysis. People who cannot see beyond their own intentions. People who piss and shit. Human beings, just like us. They were never magical. They never processed these arcane secrets. They were never unicorns.

   So I turn back now. The walls of the art world are perfectly transparent looking out. Back to the main story. Life on earth. And here I am reminded of all the art woven into daily life, that “normal” life I so feared. All of the electric moments threaded through the mundane. Tiny rituals that imbue an act with meaning. The rhythmic kneading of dough before a window, golden nebula of sunlit flour swirling above, suspended like the moment. The swaying of summer grasses or the bobbing of jostled subway commuters. The utter pointlessness of a parent, alone, making their child’s bed. Funerals. Weddings. Sex. Laughter and war. These are the moments that artists are chasing. Echoes of a life lived, slipping through clasping fingers. The true human experience.

   I am young and clearly naive. I probably already knew this lesson, but conditioned myself to forget. That this system of art as commodity, artist as royalty and all the tax evasion along the merry way, is bullshit. Everybody knew that. I knew that. I just forced myself to forget, scheming endlessly to get into this silly club. When I got to New York City, I encountered artists who reminded me of who I used to be. Obsessive creatives, driven by a need to let that inner voice sing out. To live and create. To have fun and make something beautiful. It is their irreverent disregard for the flawed opinions of elitist gatekeepers that has so inspired me. To make art like a child, joyously and for no other point than to feel that hum in the front of your skull when birthing something into the world. The hair tingling sensation one feels when attuned to that frequency, when that mysterious energy passes through your heart and mind like a river of static. The feeling itself.

   So this is where I will end. There is no lesson, no quandary to solve here and now. I wanted to make something pretty and it felt good to do so. This is not for the unicorns in their cloistered Shangri-La of white walled rooms. It is for everyone else, whose lives are as charged with beauty and meaning as the protagonist of a novel. Even if they cannot see it. It is there. Our world is porous, art seeps through like water through the soil. Inspiration comes when we learn how to see, when we turn our gaze away from “the greats” and down to the sea of tiny wonders all around us. Welcome to Earth, the world of art.