Nothing New

What makes art different.

There’s a wall of mirrors in my gym’s hot yoga studio. This morning I looked up — and there I was.

Around me were people thinner than me, more flexible than me, better at this than me. Many of them are younger, play more tennis, and eat less bacon. That accounts for a fair amount of it.

I’m more flexible than I was yesterday. And I’m in this steamy room early on Sunday morning, which I’ll deserve credit for.

Then I noticed my reflection was holding in my stomach.

The sight of that mirror had made me suck it in like Spanx. I sighed and let it hiss out of me till my gut went from a six-pack back to a keg. Namaste.

I flopped down into seal pose and thought about how much of my life I’ve spent trying to be different.

For thirty years I worked in advertising, where the whole job was making something nobody had made before. Make it break through, give it pizzazz and wow. Then I started drawing and aimed for the same thing — a snazzy style that was mine, that nobody would mistake for anyone else’s.

To be honest, almost nothing I love was just trying to be new.

Van Gogh copied Millet and Delacroix, Daumier and Hiroshige. Hockney painted landscapes, friends, his wiener dogs, and his mom. Crumb draws ordinary people on ordinary streets and pictures in dirty magazines.

None of them were trying to show me something I’d never seen before. They were showing me how they see.

A piece of art that’s only aim is to be new can stop you for a second, the way a magic trick does. Then you work out how it was done, or get bored doing so, and there’s nothing left to look at. The shock is short-lived.

Obsessing about novelty is tiring too.

It turns the fun of making into a cutthroat footrace, praying no one gets to the idea first. It never made my work better. The things I made while straining to be striking are the ones that look most dated to me now, pimply and preening.

Wanting to be the firstest and the bestest is mostly a young person’s game. At twenty-two, there isn’t much unique about you yet, so you have to make the differences visible from across the street — the hair, the tattoo, the clothes that shock your dad.

What I’ve got now instead is wrinkles, a couple of scars, less hair, and shoes worn down on the sides. I’m just another old man in the mirror.

But inside, I’m a seething stewpot. Everything I’ve looked at and read and lost and loved went into it a long time ago and has been cooking since. Crumb and Hockney are in there. So are twelve schools, two true loves, two stepfathers, Lahore, Princeton, and every book I’ve read since I was three.

Nobody else has that recipe.

So I’ve stopped worrying about originality. When I share the truth about how the world looks to me, it comes out original anyway, because nobody else is walking in these wonky shoes. That’s the whole trick, and it isn’t really a trick.

That old seal in the mirror may not look like the Lululemons and the tennis bracelets around him.

But while I yogi-squatted in front of a wall of mirrors, face red, tum out, I drafted this essay. No one else did that. And by the by, I did it first.

Your pal,

Danny