I’m trying to re-read ‘The Glass Bead Game’ by Hermann Hesse. It’s a weighty book full of allusions about the nature of knowledge. It’s not a book like ‘The Invisible Man’ which I managed to read through in an afternoon of engaged reading. How come I can read the latter in an afternoon and the former not, is the question.

Marcel Duchamp became famous by presenting a urinal as a piece of sculpture. The fascination with which it was received blew up all previously known theories of aesthetics. Art broke up into sects. Each sect claimed its own position as the most important path to beauty. With modernity, temporal relevance became an issue. Everyone forgot that, like sports, it was in the end, just a game.

The idea that some things are ‘mere entertainment’ underestimates how difficult it is to make good entertainment. The troubles begin with the word ‘enjoy’. We want to have a good time. We want to feel 'alive'. We don't want to have to think. Yet, there is more to enjoy than just the spectacle. Sports is entertaining because the animal tension in the display of athletic prowess is visually exciting but the thrill of playing to win is a huge part. Whether through superior skill or luck, a result ensues that satisfies somebody. If not, despite the wrenching disappointment of losing, few complain that they had a bad time.

Art is not a game in the same sense of having to beat perforce an adversary. Nevertheless there is the key element of play in how well and how much the mind and body reacts to art. In our times, and I'm sure also in the past, the pre-eminence of prestigious prizes in all the arts suggest that there is more to art than merely producing it. What is a Nobel, Grammy or a Booker Prize worth? If artists were capable of being honest, I would say quite a lot. So there is somewhere a referee of quality to whom we bow before we begin the play.

Recently a friend of mine, an artist, made some neat greeting cards for me. His trick is to contrast the known with the unknown. The shapes of the cards are very traditional: the folded vertical format. At the geometrically balanced point there appears a small square image inside a window cutout. He pays careful attention to detail. The structure of the card is made by at a commercial printer who uses a proper tool to cut it to an exact size and makes a precisely bevelled square window where the picture is to be mounted. The cardboard used is relatively stiff providing a solid formal setting for the artwork itself. Each picture is a unique piece, either a graphic composition or an abstract pattern. They can be pondered on at length for their meaning but most of all they are rather pleasant to look at. This is one example of how to play the art game.

I often meet to talk to another friend, an artist. He is also an architect and has a fixed job as a university professor. He is eminently qualified and accomplished. However what he wants to be above all is an artist. His forte is the fresco. He finds his inspiration from the same Muses who sparked off the Renaissance. He also sketches and paints with oil. His architectural renderings of classical buildings in watercolour are impeccable. My friend's work is imbued with meaning. He has restored allegory to its rightful place in art by insisting in a seminal work that she (allegory) has gone to sleep. He has an understanding of the classical language of ancient myths. He sees humanity in its civilised state, interceding between the gods and the natural surroundings, subsumed in a perpetual drama of mystical emotions from sunrise to sunset. Apollo rules the skies and the stars rule the souls. This is another way to play the art game.

Between these two friends sit I. I appreciate what they do and their earnest produce does amuse me well. Their styles are not comparable in any way, yet they are both rigorous and in return yearn for public esteem. I admire their dedication to their own explorations of beauty. To the card maker, beauty is a feeling captured in a fleeting moment of reverie. The graphic space is a vignette of the infinite expansion of a molecular sentiment. To the heir of the Renaissance, beauty is a result of compressing the Universe into the design of an intelligible view. In making these distinctions and publishing the hurried scribblings at my own web site as if it mattered, I do indeed seem to be playing some sort of a game myself.

I wouldn’t hesitate to build the world anew
where we don’t segregate the red from the blue.