Writing Prompt #4: What is your favorite work of art? What do you love about it?

The interesting part of this question, to me, is how to define a “work of art”. Is it a painting? Is it a selection of music? Is it a statue, a piece of architecture, a poem, or a novel? Could it, perhaps, be a dance performance, a script, a play being performed, a film or television show? Maybe it’s a mission patch from one of NASA’s Apollo missions, or a logo designed for a company. Maybe it’s even a spraypainted mural on the side of a building.

There’s so much art to choose from that it’s nearly impossible to make a single decision. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I see art everywhere in nearly everything. We express ourselves in so many myriad ways that it can be overwhelming.

One possibility for me is The Starry Night, a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. There’s something about the colors and the swirls and the darkness juxtaposed against the light that’s always appealed to me. Painted in 1889 while Van Gogh underwent self-commitment to a mental asylum, it is considered one of the most recognizable paintings in modern art.

Another personal favorite of mine (and here’s where my nerd shows through) is a concept-painting of the USS Enterprise-D created by Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach during the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation prior to the show’s premier in 1987. Originally intended to demonstrate the proposed look of the new ship, it was so well-received that it was hung on the wall of the captain’s ready room set for the entire seven-year run of the show as well as the film Star Trek: Generations.

If anyone is ever wondering what to get me for Christmas, a framed print of either of those would make me very happy.

At the end of the day, though, I’m such a voracious reader that my “favorite” work of art has to be a story, either something written in prose or something filmed. Even narrowing it down that far leaves almost too many possibilities to think about. There are so many short stories, novels, comic books, television shows and films that have moved me over the years that I could teach several college courses on the subject and still only scratch the surface.

Of all the possibilities, I’m going to go with a simple one. It’s a comic book limited series called Midnight Nation, written by my favorite author, J. Michael Straczynski. It’s the story of a detective, shot dead by a suspect, who gets stuck in a place between life and death and who goes on a cross-country road trip to regain his soul from the Devil and in the process discovers who he really is as a person. Along the way, he discovers a multitude of lost souls who have been discarded, ignored, or forgotten by the daylight world we all inhabit. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but in my twenties the ending struck me in a way that I don’t think anything else ever has. The thing I love about it is the self-discovery: our hero starts his journey wanting one thing, but at the end he realizes what he actually wants is something very different.

Even so, at the end of the day, I think trying to choose a favorite is an exercise in futility. There are far, far too many works of art out there that demand our attention, that demand our respect, to ever narrow the list down to just one or even two or three. If life is an exploration of possibilities, of ideas, then surely art is one of the tools we use in that endeavor. No matter how much we expose ourselves to, there’s always more out there, and I take comfort from that. The exploration will never be over.