it’s weird that artwork + money = art

I bought a painting from a local artist, recently, and when I met her in the coffee shop where it had been hanging—the coffee shop where we had seen it and said, you know what? We really like that painting, what if we bought it, let’s buy it—the artist told me how happy she was to meet me, and to know where we intended to put it. She wished us well. I had already venmo-ed her the money, that she clearly needed, and she had already taken the painting down and wrapped it in plastic. In that sense, the painting was already mine, but it had felt necessary to talk for a minute about the painting, about what it meant to her and why we liked it, before this object that she had spent so much time and energy creating could pass into my possession. It was like adopting a puppy. I had the fleeting urge to tell her she could come and visit it, if she wanted to, and I promised to send her a photo of where it hung on the wall.

(I’m trying to remember if I did; I think I forgot.)

I didn’t tell her that we liked her painting much more than we had liked her artist statement, which we had looked up on the internet. Her account of what the painting was, and did, and said, was far less interesting than the painting itself. After we read the artist statement, we repeatedly didn’t buy the painting, for a few months. But eventually we got over that. The painting now hangs on a wall, and the statement does not.

It’s a strange thing to buy a work of art, and an even stranger thing to sell it. Until I gave her money, she could do whatever she wanted with that painting. She could change it, she could work more on it, she could burn it if she wanted to. She could give it a name, and write words on the internet about what it meant. After I gave her money, she couldn’t really do any of those things anymore. Everything she had done to those materials, all the work she had done to make them “art,” those were things an artist was doing, but all of that stopped the moment when I gave her money. After that, she isn’t allowed to do any more work on that piece of art.

What if she called me up and told me that she wanted to make a few changes to the painting? An emergency recall, or routine maintenance? Would I let her come to our house and touch it up? Would I contact her, if something wasn’t working about the painting? Do paintings come with a warranty, or would that be extra? Maybe I would just do it myself. I’m not a painter, but I could look up painting instructional videos on youtube and figure it out.

It’s strange that money is the reason why the work, on a work of art, can just stop like that. I’m sure giving an artist money actually helps her make art, in the grand scheme of things; it had been difficult to find a time when we could meet, in that café, to do the official handover, because she spent a lot of time pet-sitting in other cities, for money she clearly needed. We persevered, and found a time, because for some reason, it had seemed important to do the handover in person. But the work was done; the art had become an object, a thing that hangs on the wall, and is not worked on anymore. It was not an ongoing relationship. If the painting had her name on it, in some sense, that name signified little more than a brand.

We’re so used to art like this, that we don’t tend to think that it’s weird. By the time we read a novel, for example, the writer has moved on from the work, which for them is long finished, “set in stone” as the saying goes, an exaggeration that expresses the structuring ideal. By the time an author does interviews, or a book tour (“what were you thinking about when you wrote this?”), they are probably hard at work on their next novel, their memory already fading of the long period of time when everything in their book was still in flux. They will have, by then, developed and canned a variety of answers about what everything means, or why it is the way it is, which for them, by then, will really be the way it really is. This was probably not the case when they were still writing their novel, when they could still, at any moment (and almost certainly did) dramatically change courses or alter what they were writing, or re-assess what they thought they were doing and why (because whose account of why they’re doing something is reliable?). What happens in their novel, once you buy it and read it: that is now what happens in the novel, and always was.

In this way, J.K. Rowling can retroactively declare that characters in her novel were actually gay the whole time, but we can also make fun of her for that, because that’s not how it works. On the other hand, when J.R.R. Tolkien first wrote “Riddles in the Dark,” the chapter of The Hobbit in which Bilbo acquires a ring from Gollum, that ring wasn’t The One Ring of Power, not yet, because he hadn’t written The Lord of the Rings. It was just a magic ring, then; only after he wrote his later, far more famous trilogy, did he go back and revise The Hobbit, so that now it’s clear that Gollum’s ring had always been Sauron’s ring, even though it originally wasn’t. And if George R.R. Martin never finishes his Game of Thrones books, it will probably be because readers already figured out the ending he had in mind, from the shows, and he can’t figure out a new ending to surpass it. How can he end something that was already ended?

It is probably meaningful that when I’m looking for examples of novels that changed after publication, that trouble a sense of novelistic finality, the examples all turned out to be genre fiction, fantasy? But I’m not sure what it means.

Here is what I do think, though: You don’t tend to meet the novelist in the coffee shop where the novel was displayed. You usually find their book as a finished product, in the kind of store that sells products, whether it’s brick-and-mortar retail or a website that sends it to you in the mail. Before the person or company who sells you the book ever touches it, the author already gave the book to a publisher, who turns the manuscript (most likely, a word document) into a uniform print run of identical objects; their work, at some point in this process, became a commodity, the difference between a piece of work and an art being the removal of the artist. And then you buy it, and then you read it, and then it is what it is, then, for you, forever, and it always was.