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I have often thought of artists as the mirrors held up before the world. To some extent they are. They are the mirror on the wall you pass with haste and glance at, when you realize the booger hanging from your nose and bags under your eyes and coffee stain on your shirt from that morning. “What!?” you whisper to yourself as you disappear to the bathroom to clean up a bit, “Why didn’t anyone tell me about that?”
Goethe once wrote:
“We have the daily struggle, inescapable and deadly serious, to seize upon the world and bring it into the directest possible contact with all that is seen, felt, thought, imagined, experienced.”
Like a mirror, the goal of the artist is to bring the world into contact with itself. Good art is un-self-conscious, like the mirror; it reflects without an agenda. Sometimes it reflects just one part of life.
My wife has this mirror for applying make-up that makes me gasp every time I accidentally look into it; it blows up your nose so big that its a wonder she can look into it and walk out the door the next minute. If I looked into it everyday I’d be a sniveling, spineless wreck of a man. But sometimes art works in this way, playing and exaggerating on life. It’s a mirror held up for a specific purpose, and maybe it questions our view of reality like a funhouse mirror distorts, or a beauty mirror exaggerates.
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