There are days, many days in fact, where I, an innocent man trying to enjoy his home, feel instead like the curator of an art gallery of the damned. On chairs, on the table, behind the couch, on the desk: art, art, art. Little drawings of castles that look like turds. Green squiggles that we are made to call “unicorns”. Endless pages of doodles and scribbles and collages, which are what we call pieces of food stuck to construction paper with a quart of Elmers.
It’s not the low quality of this all this production that bothers me–my kid-art, I’m sure, was equally demented. But it’s our inability to throw any of this away. We have not been given permission to throw anything away, a thought that is true and yet also makes me want to break something. We somehow have consented to play a self-defeating role in all this, whereby we praise each new picture as if it were a Tintoretto or Titian, and then, believing us, our children do not allow us to throw these pieces where most of them belong, which is the garbage can.
Instead we are made to tape them up, in hugely conspicuous places, where not only do they need to be looked at all the time, but they also will be immediately noticed if they go missing.
Look, I’m not against child art. Our daughter Dalia is even betraying, through her art, a nascent science mind, with her complex and ultimately mystifying schematics of how apples are made or how the hallways of a castle link together. And it’s no secret to us or our friends that we have little children, and that we treasure them with the myopia that all parents of young children have. A piece of art here or there would be perfectly acceptable. But it’s sheer depressing volume of it all that is troubling us.
And before you say that I should just stack them and put them in a folder, you should know that Dalia’s preschool delighted in sending her home with the most oversized and odd-shaped creations, as if it were some achievement to create very long squiggles instead of very short ones. These things don’t just tuck away. They take over.
If you, dear readers, have tips on either how to 1) convince a child that their art is both very special and belongs in the trash or 2) archive artwork in some non-obtrusive way, it would be quite welcome. Or perhaps we should, in honor of the season and the city, just ban everything except sidewalk chalk.
Put them in one of those big over sized envelopes one gets at the post office and ship ’em off to grandma’s. Priority.
You poor soul. We just pretty much automatically throw away all of Sasha’s artwork, often without even looking at it. When she’s older, I guess, and proud of her work, I imagine we’ll end up in your predicament. But till then, we’ve got plenty of material for lighting charcoal in the grill.
Do what my mom did. Save them for 30 years, then dump them on the adult version of the child to “curate” into eternity. Sigh. I must have the biggest collection of crap child art of any of you …
Put them up for a week or two, and then take a fabulous digital picture of each piece. Then make a monograph on a photobook website. 100 creations a year become a slim volume. No guilt, and they are actually kinda cool.
yes, get thee a big envelope — grannies are waiting to receive!
I agree with Kelly- photobook those unicorns right up. I also frame a couple of particularly interesting pieces each semester (just switch them out) to hang in kids’ rooms or the little playroom.
Nate-
NYT has recently dealt with this scourge: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/garden/27art.html
@Brad Ach–we’ve been scooped. By the Times. Again. Will get DadWagon’s private detectives inquiring about the immigration status of the author of that piece, pronto
@Kerry @Kelly I think you might win the prize for most practical/likely to happen. But @Michael’s sense of revenge and karmic returns is quite appealing, if not for the storage problem that arises.
@Matt: I hope at least you go to a bar and trash them there, or burn them with a cigarette, or mop the bar floor with them. You have a reputation to uphold.
@Murth: well put. One man’s art-trash is another grandma’s art-treasure.
i’m with matt. i can’t say i feel any psychological trauma over the fact that there’s no record of my art production as a five-year-old..