Aesthetics Seminar as the Last Supper
We sit around an oblong table by the one window in the room-
though Da Vinci painted all his figures on just one side,
leaving the other side open for the devil, no doubt.
I love to see questions pose in disciples’ faces, then and now.
The Old Testament of high school drifting off like fishing boats.
Today we study the Institutional Theory of Art, which is:
An artifact only becomes art when the artworld confers that status.
That conferral is the only necessary and sufficient condition of art.
Difficult to swallow, like baked crust.
But no one chokes or throws it back
because they all feel they need a teacher.
And I’ve come to train them from their belief
that the skin of art is pleasure or its bones poverty.
I write on the blackboard and they tap their fingers on laptops,
distilling words into a rainfall that is both
longing and fulfillment at once.
Later we walk to our separate parking lots,
remembering moments that scattered
like crumbs throughout the room,
seconds when we believed our little thoughts
were stars pricking through a black canopy.
Stars we thought we could sail by to some new home,
a port both necessary and sufficient.
Next week, the real black canopy:
I’ll teach them how Renaissance masters
used a camera obscura to project a clean image onto canvas,
an image they would have to trace, obedient to every detail,
though the picture was upside down.
That one flaw they could easily fix later.
;
;
Composer, performer, scholar, and poet Michael Hicks received a DMA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and has been teaching at BYU since 1985. He is the author of four books-Mormonism and Music: A History (1989), Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (1999), Henry Cowell, Bohemian (2002), and The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book (2012); the first three of these were published by University of Illinois Press, which in 2012 published his book co-authored with Christian Asplund, entitled Christian Wolff. His dozens of historical and analytical articles have appeared in books such as the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Mormonism as well as journals that include American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, and Perspectives of New Music. He has been a guest lecturer at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley and has read papers at various national conferences (including UCLA’s multidisciplinary Conference on American Studies Connecting with Religion, 1991) and national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.
He has twice won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1994 and 2003) for his writing about music and a third time as editor of the journal American Music, a post he held from 2007-2010. His poetry, meanwhile, has been published in Dialogue, BYU Studies, Literature and Belief, Sunstone, and in the anthologies Cadence of Hooves (2008), New Poets of the American West (2010), and Fire in the Pasture (2011).
;
If you would like to submit your work to P&L, please see the P&L Submissions Guide.