While I was in San Antonio I spent some time looking at an exhibit of nineteenth and early twentieth century French art glass at the McNay Art Musuem. The McNay is one of my favorite small museums, and I try to go by each time I am in town.
This time the glass captured my attention, probably because I had just seen an entirely different collection of glass, glass created using entirely different techniques, in Arkansas at the Chihuly exhibit. As I studied the small pieces and read the information posted, I thought about art and skill and fashion, how we hold ideas in our heads. Looking at these small pieces of glass, I was thinking that some of them can never be recreated, the technique has been lost. I'm certain we did not intend to lose that knowledge, those particular skills. There were wars, people died, so many things changed. We value different skills now, but sometimes we don't even know what we lost until we have lost it.
I remember back when I was in my early 20s, talking to artists in the Woodstock community of New York state. I remember being told that only mouth-blown glass was true art, that fused glass, glass formed in molds, was inferior, was not art. Did the first person who fused glass together and carved it think that? No. I suspect not.
Of course we know better now, know that art and beauty come in many forms, in many guises. Hopefully we know we are as apt to lose them as we are to hold on to them, and that those two desires, two results, are interrelated. Hopefully we know that we can hold to tightly and crush the life. We can hold too loosely and not realize that what we truly valued has been lost. Or do we?
