Spud

Obituary in today’s Times, the headline called him, “a Philosopher of Art”.  His life, he had been quoted, had changed in 1964 upon encountering Andy Warhol’s sculpture, “Brillo Box.” Not unlike a philosopher, some of the world’s view of the artist’s work is, “what the hell is it for, what’s the function.” The Brillo box’s function is to hold the Brillo pads, and sometimes it functions well, and sometimes it gets wet on the kitchen counter and becomes useless. The sculpture, more permanently made of silkscreened plywood, functioned as art because an art gallery in New York presented it as such, and you had to be smart enough, educated enough, to know what art is. Who the hell cared? In my small city there is a well-thought-of collection of abstract-expressionist paintings and sculpture lining the halls of government that my gym teacher in freshman year, an assistant baseball coach with a substantial neck and white crew-cut named Spud, referred to as “crud” that “any shitass could have made in his garage," suggesting that  baseball would give our young lives meaning and Mark Rothko was an idle and shiftless troublemaker without a decent curveball. The Philosopher of Art, said the obit writer, struggled with meaning and purpose, with “the relationship between knowledge and belief, photography and truth…” Art, Philosophy, the reasons that we live, think, struggle to stay alive, to hold on to something memorable and value it.  It is true there are baseball games I will never forget, burned in my memory. What use a sculpture, a drawing, of a Box of Brillo? It may simply be worth what somebody, a philosopher or a gym teacher, says it is.