Art Doesn’t Own It

‘I met my dad again after fifteen years,’ I said to the room. ‘It was in the backseat of my aunt’s car outside the airport. He grabbed my left hand with both of his hands, said papa loves you… papa misses you. That was how he spoke. Fifteen years. But he didn’t have a grasp of time anymore. He shook my left hand. It was like he’d been storing up all his energy to see me, because afterwards he turned away and looked out of the window. I tried to memorise things. The smell of the air freshener, the pattern on his shirt, the view outside. He probably forgot I was there, at least until we arrived at my aunt’s house. For the rest of the trip, I wheeled him around shopping malls and family houses. People gave us tea and cried. He looked at them like he looked at me, as if he’d already said goodbye and was only waiting to be wheeled on to the next place. But he was stuck. I was stuck too. I’d been in a relationship for nearly twelve years, and it was ending. The jet lag kept getting worse. I stayed up and looked through messages on my phone. I never cried in front of my dad. It’s funny I keep saying my dad, not Dad. I was fully aware that the ending of my relationship existed on such a small scale compared with the ending of his life. It was wrong to compare them. But both of these things were happening at the same time, and I guess I couldn’t help it. It did make me feel worse.’ 

I was sharing this story with a group of writers. Afternoon light came in through the windows. The surreal view – for someone from the city – of green fields pressed up against the glass. ‘Have you read Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller?’’ said one of the writers. ‘Benjamin recounts an episode from Herodotus’s Histories where the captured Egyptian king Psammenitus is forced to watch his conqueror’s triumphal procession. He watches his daughter taken away from him and his son led to his execution. But Psammenitus ignores them, standing motionless, eyes fixed on the ground, until he recognises one of his servants among those captured – an elderly, impoverished man – and starts to beat his fists against his head in mourning. Benjamin compares this story to a seed. A story preserves and releases its power over time. It could lie dormant for centuries before implanting itself in a new listener. The dryness of Herodotus’s report – its pared-back, almost abstract quality – is what makes this implanting possible.’ 

‘I like the image of a seed,’ said another writer. ‘A story for me is like a taste. It’s there in the moment, but then something else – something you can’t own – stays with you after the details fade. You can taste it in your mouth.’ ‘I’m not sure what I shared qualifies as a story,’ I said. ‘So little happens: a person travels abroad; they care for their dad. I want to hear other people’s stories.’ ‘But maybe there’s a connection,’ said the writer who quoted Benjamin. ‘The seed of it – the part that surprised me as you said it, like Psammenitus’s sudden beating of his head – was the ambivalence towards your father, the way you expressed something either self-enclosed (cruel) or out-of-synch about grief.’ ‘Does Benjamin give his reading of the story?’ said another writer. ‘He offers several explanations for Psammenitus’s grief,’ the writer responded. ‘Either the king isn’t moved by the suffering of those with royal blood because he knows he shares the same fate as them, or he views the servant as something unreal, like an actor, and events on stage move us more than those in real life, or perhaps ‘great grief is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation’. But no single explanation is fully satisfying. That’s why the story preserves its power.’ 

A new writer started talking. ‘Last month,’ she said, ‘I went to visit my cousin Jo. Jo is a nurse and lives with her daughter in a houseshare with two friends. She put me up in their box room. It was just about big enough to unroll a futon, though you couldn’t open the door without folding it up again and making a noise, so I kept worrying about needing to pee in the middle of the night. Jo is a writer as well. She’s trying to write about nursing. She recommended Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Has everyone read it? It was his last collection of short stories, published posthumously, and Jo gave me a copy. I sat up late one night on my futon reading it, trying to avoid any thought of needing to pee, and got stuck on one scene in particular. That’s the story I wanted to share. It’s not my own. The story centres on this wealthy, obnoxious character called Miller Thomas. Miller is hosting a dinner party where the narrator is a guest. Miller has a valuable painting above the fireplace, and the narrator suggests – because of the risk of heat or smoke damage – Miller might not want to keep it there. The painting is by the American modernist Marsden Hartley, though we don’t know what it depicts. Anyway, Miller responds angrily to the narrator’s concern for the painting. He takes the picture off the wall and then, holding it like a tray, thrusts it into and out of the fire. “Is it art?” he says. “Sure. But listen, art doesn’t own it. My name ain’t Art.”’ 

A packet of salt and vinegar crisps was opened and shared around. Murmurs passed through the room. The conversation turned to the relationship between art and commodities. ‘Art may differ from other commodities in supposedly being a kind of non-fungible (irreplaceable) asset, in the sense that there can only be one Mona Lisa,’ said a writer at the back. ‘But it’s that irreplaceability which has had such a perverse effect on its material treatment under capitalism. Art is a safe investment; it can be locked up. So you get freeport warehouses in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Singapore where billionaires stockpile thousands of artworks like canned meat. Miller keeps his art in his living room but that doesn’t mean he cares about it more. Miller burns his art but that doesn’t mean he cares about it less. In treating art as a commodity, you sever the relationship between worth and value.’ ‘But there’s a difference between a story and a work of art,’ said the writer who shared the story about Miller. ‘A story is much harder to burn. If the seed of a story survives in any form, as a physical or oral trace, it can be reconstituted. Sometimes partialness can even help to preserve it, acting in the same way as dryness. If it keeps coming back, what does that mean? I think stories begin with that question. Which raises another question: Is it possible to tell apart a memory and a story?’

‘I’ve met your cousin Jo,’ I said. ‘She knew my dad. I know it seems strange. Jo flew in from time to time with her parents. But she only met my dad a couple of times as a teenager, I think.’ A writer sitting to the left of me said that she worked as a nurse, in palliative care. Something had made her want to share a story too. ‘But it’s not really a story,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking of a lady called Maeve who died on the ward recently. She had bad dementia, alcohol-induced, and was basically non-verbal by the time she came to us, but she was lovely. She’d always say the same things: I missed you darling, how’s your mother, oh you look thin. And she was always rubbing surfaces, patting them like pets. She smiled in the sweetest way, showing off the food in her teeth. Everyone loved Maeve. But she had no family. Her family had disowned her. So it was a struggle, after she died, trying to get anyone to identify the body. There’s a distance involved in caring sometimes, it can be cruel. But it’s part of intimacy. Now I think about it, it’s funny how caring for someone can get in the way of knowing them properly. That personal knowledge you associate with intimacy in other situations – friendships, relationships – becomes redundant. It doesn’t matter what Maeve did, or who she was. That was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The question of who you are drops away at the end. You just need someone to hold your hand, give you food, wheel you around the park.’ 

Our conversation circled back to Miller’s line. I repeated it out loud: ‘Is it art? Sure. But listen, art doesn’t own it. My name ain’t Art.’ There were various interpretations offered by the writers. One writer pointed out the connection to Marx. ‘You know what he says about how private property alienates the individual personality not only of people but also of things? Maybe Miller’s joke about his name not being ‘Art’ is a rejoinder to Marx. He’s flaunting his ability to alienate the art object from itself – through ownership – and make it commensurate with a new car or knife set. It becomes an extension of himself, more Miller than Art. Since money is the most general, exchangeable form of property, it’s also the most directly opposed to personal peculiarity. It renders personal things abstract, exchangeable. Miller is burning away the personality of the artwork, returning it to its most abstract form under capitalism: money. And the ability to burn money is the simplest signifier of status, of power.’ 

Another writer was a poet. She said that Marx quoted Shakespeare making the same argument in Timon of Athens: ‘Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair; / Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.  / […] Thou visible god, / That solderst close impossibilities, / And makest them kiss!’ ‘He could be describing how money works today,’ said the poet. ‘Its magical – which is to say, alienating – way of transforming social relations: ascribing beauty, whitewashing scandal, bolstering reputations. Miller is burning money, a ‘visible god’, to assert his own godliness. But in this situation – I mean, the play – Timon isn’t just making an argument. He’s speaking in poetry, in blank verse. So what he says could be taken as a comment on poetry as well.’ She stopped for a moment, as if gesturing towards the divide between speech in reality and in fiction. ‘Of course, Marx wouldn’t have gone into this second, ironic feature of Timon’s speech because he was sceptical about the ability of art to do anything other than reflect underlying economic and social conditions. But it’s striking that the operations of poetry can be analysed in a similar manner to those of money – switching or dissolving contraries (like right and wrong), alienating our sense of things (estranging a person) – only in the service of individuality. It’s as if poetry mimics the operations of capital in order to parody them. Maybe that’s the only response it can offer, being soldered to the economic system from which it emerges. A bad echo. But what I’m saying doesn’t necessarily apply to Johnson’s story. It isn’t a poem.’ The poet paused again. ‘Miller’s burning of the painting could be read as if it were the account of a real-life event – I suppose that’s how we’ve been talking about it – but that would mean ignoring the fact it’s embedded in a narrative. And the description of an action is very different from the action itself. Does that make sense? In real life, Miller might be bluntly asserting his property claim. In the narrative, even as Miller asserts his ownership, the unpossessable essence of the story dissolves his claim to it, his claim to the work of art.’ 

Trees rustled in the late afternoon light. We knew we’d have to give the room back soon. I went back to my story and began again. ‘It had only been a year since I’d seen my dad, but it felt like longer. I saw him in the backseat of my uncle’s car outside the airport. The first thing he said was you look thin. He kissed my temple like I was a kid, and then turned away and looked out of the window. My uncle was driving. I tried to memorise things. The smell of clove cigarettes, the music on the radio, the view outside. He probably forgot I was there until we arrived at my uncle’s house.’ The writer to my left took up the story as her own: ‘For the rest of the trip, I wheeled him around shopping malls and family houses. People gave us tea and cried. One day, instead of going to another house or restaurant, my uncle took us out of the city and we went to a ravine. He bought us oranges from a stall and we ate them on the side of the road.’ ‘By this stage, it was hard to recognise him,’ said another writer. ‘I took a photo of him in his wheelchair by the ravine looking straight at the camera, sucking an orange rind. And I forced myself to look him in the face. I was thinking to myself – the way I was asking these questions – it was like I was standing in front of a painting: What is it saying? Who is he? What does it mean? But then he smiled, his mouth copying mine, and I could see bits of orange stuck between his teeth.’ 

‘I just looked up Hartley Marsden’s paintings,’ said one of the writers, holding up their phone. ‘They’re beautiful, his clouds especially. They look like bedsheets. You can almost feel the bulge of the linen, arms and legs curling around each other.’ ‘For Miller,’ said another writer, ‘the beauty of Hartley’s work is either incidental or insulting. That’s weird, isn’t it? He must’ve come across Hartley’s work in a gallery or auction house and been drawn to its beauty. The painting is referred to as ‘his beloved Hartley’ in the text, but Miller takes offence at the narrator’s concern for it. How has beauty come to undermine the art object’s status as property?’ ‘Maybe because,’ said the writer next to him, ‘on some level – eye level, at least – beauty transcends ownership. And men like Miller will turn to violence to reassert it.’ 

‘Do you know Susan Stewart?’ the writer responded. ‘There’s a passage in one of her books where she describes watching a child on the beach carefully build a sandcastle. When he’s done, he looks at his completed work, runs at it and destroys it utterly, until it’s just another pile of mush indistinguishable from the sand around it. It isn’t a parable about male violence, although there is that connection to Miller. For Stewart, that boy represents a certain relation we all have to making. The potential for destruction – unmaking – always shadows the act of making.’ We talked about two ways the destruction of the sandcastle could be read: ‘Either the boy-artist is, as Stewart suggests, returning the power of form back into himself; or, conversely, he’s relinquishing the work’s power, conferring it on other beachgoers like Stewart. This second reading, perverse as it might be, argues for an art – the story – which gains value by renouncing ownership.’ 

‘Remember what you said about how a story is different from a work of art because it can’t be owned? Did you say that?’ I looked at the writer next to me, who looked at the writer next to her. ‘Stories can be packaged and sold but they can’t – in their simplest form – be owned. They don’t exist in the same tangible (fungible) way as material art. And story used in this sense suggests a category that could include art as well.’ ‘Each story,’ said the poet, ‘has a seed which is separate from – and goes beyond – its form. There’s this story about your dad, about Maeve, about Miller’s painting. The story changes every time it’s shared. But no matter how many details you alter, it stays the same. It leaves the same taste. Language is liquid; it can’t be owned. It’s a parody of capital.’ ‘Last month,’ I said, ‘I was at the supermarket and I saw a man kiss his son’s temple because his son was in a huff, and I started crying.’ ‘Great grief is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation,’ said another writer. ‘There are always more details,’ said the poet. ‘The smell and weight of the orange. The cartoon animal on your dad’s shirt. The dirt under his nails. The nicotine stains on Maeve’s fingers. But this is the story we’re telling now, together. You could burn it without making any difference to it. You could add to it. You could take it and tell it as your own.’

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan University Press in the US. He has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule, and co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio with Delaina Haslam in 2022. He currently works in extra-care homes and is a Visiting Poetry Fellow at UEA working towards a community-led archive of poets’ work.