Our Greatest Joys Are Built on the Suffering of Others. Waking Up To A Tired Cliché.

Back when I was collecting industrial antiques, I bought some old trouble light cages from a guy in Brooklyn off of eBay. I had just gotten back to the city and offered to pick them up from his apartment so I could save him the "trouble" of drop shipping, and he agreed.

I strolled into his one bedroom apartment that evening and was taken aback. The entire apartment - literally the entire apartment - was covered floor to ceiling with antique lamps. And not ghetto swap meet crap - gorgeous, perfectly preserved antiques, one on top of the next, floor to ceiling in every room.

My mouth dropped open. I love this stuff, and I couldn't help but effuse:

"This is incredible. I've never seen anything like it. What an amazing collection. . ." etc etc.

He replied in a flat deadpan that was not meant to be a deadpan:"Yes, it's a mental illness."

I tried to introduce some levity and say, "Yeah but. . . this is amazing," but the guy seemed genuinely despondent and clearly viewed himself as an obsessive sicko who had yet found one outlet (rimshot) for his tendencies that made his life bearable.

I stuck around chatting for as long as I could, asking questions, taking it all in, learning the history. I remember him saying he had had multiple offers for his entire collection. Millions of dollars each, all of which he declined.

His wife seemed perfectly normal and came home to join us part way through my visit. She was unfazed by the collection, by me, or by her husband's eccentricities, and really could have been any other ordinary Brooklyn quasi-yuppie wife.

I found the whole thing enchanting and did not want to go. For those of you who knew me in my industrial antique "period," the search was obsessive for me as well, but not nearly to this degree.

Eventually I took a mental photograph, which I had mostly forgotten about until just now, paid cash for my items (sorry eBay!) and walked out into the night, satisfied that I had collected yet another New York story that was likely as not irreproducible nearly anywhere else in the world. My love of New York salvaged and somewhat redeemed, I remember thinking to myself, "Well they haven't got rid of ALL the crazies. . . God speed you awesome lamp man.

"I'm sure he went back to his tinkering, adjusting, cataloging, and all the rest of the stuff he did to keep his obsessiveness from consuming him as soon as I left.

Seeing this video tonight, I was reminded of Lamp Man and got to meditating a bit about art and what most people call "mental illness." When do we cross from one to the other? And does it matter?

Recently I was introduced to an incredible OK Go music video that took a 4 second film fragment and spread it out - at 10,000 frames per second - over 4 minutes to correspond precisely to the song it was set to.

It was a tour de force of meticulosity, if such a word exists, and took weeks - or months - to complete at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars.

And it was incredible. In its way.

After it was over, I was thinking about business vs art, and that in business the goal is to spend as little effort as possible for as much gain as possible, in other words to leverage whatever you can for the greatest returns.

With art, it is often the reverse: one spends an incredible amount of time, money, concentration, and effort, for something that may only be a few minutes long. And in a way, that superficiality, that unnecessariness is exactly what makes it art.

But somewhere in there, there is a circle to be squared, and I think through improvisation one tends to find it, which is why I am less moved by this kind of hyper-detailed craftsmanship than I am just kind of impressed, and maybe a little saddened.

I had tried so hard to be enthusiastic for my Lamp Guy, but in the end I could see he was genuinely miserable. For how many artists is this the exact same conceit

Anyway, I have many more thoughts on this which I will save for another time. For now, the OK GO video, the lamp guy, and whatever lunatic constructed this airplane model have all earned my admiration if not my envy. I would love to see what they could all do without their neuroses and with their real creativity flowing in its place. But that's yet another discussion. . .

It's been a very intense emotional weekend for the culture, so it's nice to take a second for art to remind us what it's like to live outside of time, where art often makes its home, even for a just a moment.

Have a good week everybody. D