I remember being told by an optician that I had 'good' eyes. I was three years old at the time and being fitted with my first pair of glasses. I had good eyes but they were the wrong shape. Since then I have always worn glasses, each pair with lenses thicker than the last.

Following an adolescent religious phase, a close friend of mine came to believe fervently in Art. Art was distinct from life, surely – otherwise why had works of art been sieved out from quotidian phenomena from time immemorial ? - and he wanted to be an artist. I mean an Artist, like Whistler. He spent years, unsuccessfully, trying to work out what it was exactly that made art look different.

Recently someone gave me Patrick Trevor-Roper's book The World Through Blunted Sight. It examines the ways in which defective vision can be related to character, creativity and style.

Apparently, "among artists not only does myopia predominate, but such myopic artists, when they cannot manage without their glasses, rarely like having their myopia fully neutralised, and prefer to paint 'uncorrected'".

In his search for Art my friend stumbled across Duchamp and now he believes that art has more to do with 'grey matter' than with 'aesthetic delectation'. He has been unnaturally constant in this proto-post-modernist faith but, you never know, an imminent mid-life crisis might change everything.

I have a daughter, three years old, and she seems to me to be the most beautiful thing in the world.
Perhaps she is a work of art. Perhaps she is an artist.

Jonathan Watkins August 1996 ~ Jonathan Watkins is the curator at the Serpentine Gallery

 

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