More Importantly.

I recently went to the MET (as I promised I would in my last post), and I saw an exhibit of Alexander McQueen’s work called Savage Beauty. He was an absolute genius, the kind that artists like myself aspire to be. Though I’m a writer and he’s a designer, our job of self expression, creation, and story telling, is basically the same.

He blew my mind. McQueen said that he was an artist and that fashion was just the medium through which he expressed himself—that made me think he could have been a painter or a poet or a sculptor. I have a friend who is working on what she hopes will be her Master’s Degree thesis, a memoir piece on her early childhood, specifically her relationship with her father, and to me, she and McQueen are on the same level. She is purely an artist, someone who creates, who tells stories. She does so with words, and McQueen did so with clothes (see: Highland Rape). I choose to do it with words too–that’s my medium–but if I picked up a paint brush would I be able to tell the same stories with the same success? Would the art be just as powerful in any form? Would McQueen be the icon he is, if he was a writer? Or would he have failed? My friend, let’s call her Jane, can’t draw. She tried to play piano once, and let me tell you, she’s awful. But somehow still, the form that she picked (or that was picked for her?) seems arbitrary. As though she was always meant to create art, but some cosmic force put all the mediums together in a hat and drew “writer”.

Pictures from my trip to MET to come soon…Keep an eye out and check back soon.