Ownership Redefined
One of my favorite things in life is finding unexpected connections in disparate places. I find the parallel evolution of ideas thrilling especially when the sources are worlds apart. When two people converge on the same pearl of wisdom from completely different angles, it makes that ah-ha moment feel all the more electrifying.
In Insomniac City, one of my favorite books of 2020, Bill Hayes recounts visiting a Garry Winogrand photography exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his nieces. After wandering the show and running out of sufficient adjectives to exclaim their amazement and appreciation for the work, Hayes asked his 14-year-old niece what her favorite piece was. She had picked a Monet water lily painting from a different room.
“This is when I let each girl in on a secret: It can be yours. No different from falling in love with a song, one may fall in love with a work of art and claim it as one’s own. Ownership does not come free. One must spend time with it; visit at different times of day or evening; and bring to it one’s full attention. The investment will be repaid as one discovers something new with each viewing — say, a detail in the background, a person nearly cropped from the picture frame, or a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, deliberately so, one may assume, as if to remind you not to take all the painted parts for granted.
This is true not just for New Yorkers but for anyone anywhere with art to be visited — art being a relative term, in my definition. Your Monet may, in fact, be an unpolished gemstone or a mineral element. Natural history museums are filled with beauties fairly begging to be adopted. Stay Alert. Next time a tattered Egyptian mummy speaks to you across the ages, don’t walk away. Stay awhile. Spend some time with it. Give it a proper name. Yours.
…
Perhaps the best part about possessing art in this way is that what’s mine can be yours, and vice versa. In fact, I would not be surprised if half of New York City has also put dibs on the Monet that Emily chose. This made it no less hers.
I brought her in closer to her new acquisition: “Emily, meet your Monet. Monet, Emily.”
Words did not fail her: “Hello, beautiful,” she whispered.
God I love that. It immediately brought to mind a very similar idea that has always stuck with me from a strange and beautiful little book titled On The Loose by Terry and Renny Russle. The two brothers were 19 and 21 years old when they wrote and compiled the book, first published by the Sierra Club in 1967, which is a mix of color and black and white photos from Yosemite, Point Reyes, the High Sierra, the Great Basin, and Glen Canyon in the 1950s and 1960s, prose, and poetry, all written in calligraphic text.
One of the best-paying professions is getting ahold of pieces of the country in your mind, learning their smell and their moods, sorting out the pieces of a view, deciding what grows there and there and why, how many steps that hill will take, where this creek winds and where it meets the other one below, what elevation timberline is now, whether you can walk this reef at low tide or have to climb around, which contour lines on a map mean better cliffs or mountains. This is the best kind of ownership, and the most permanent.
It feels good to say, “I know the Sierra” or “I know Point Reyes.” But of course you don’t — what you know better is yourself and Point Reyes and the Sierra have helped.
I feel that so powerfully. I think about that short passage often as I meticulously study and then enthusiastically explore a new hunting area or a ski line. I also think this idea connects to something deep and essential that modern western culture seems to be lacking — an idea of the shared commons.
This concept of ownership is personally freeing, especially in an age of increasing wealth gaps where the vast majority of people feel they’ve been left out and left behind. The idea of shared conceptual ownership may be a bulwark against the zero sum game of individuality-driven tribe-first mentality we’ve fallen into. In a tangible sense, it is why I feel so passionately about the protection of public land. On a more conceptual level I wonder if we could extrapolate this concept to include a shared future that we all feel intimately invested in? That question deserves more page-space that I can include here but it’s fun to think about.