Art Along the Aether, Final Chapter – Xperience Fiction

Art Along the Aether, Final Chapter – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

And so art died, and the funeral, though sparsely attended, was glorious. The flow and the aesthetic left in its wake were used to fashion the most outstanding arrangement of floral displays in the known universe, and in fifty percent of the unknown universe, upon a favorable guess. The guestbook was signed by every listless, creative luminary who’d been made impotent by the spoiling of their bread and butter. The signatures, like the floral arrangements, were a thing to behold, but alas, the book was stolen, to no one’s surprise.

Speaking of stolen books, the Poet, Cyra, was reunited with her tome, and returned it to the Warehouse, which is one of the few places that learned of art’s passing and continued on. Currently God is reading a marketing book. The warehouse will be cleared out in a week’s time and is currently on a war footing.

The Gallery didn’t take it so well. As it had long ago declared itself an arbiter of the arts and a tastemaker in all things craft, it had unknowingly put itself in the position of having to be art’s next of kin. The world, with the exception of the warehouse and all such rebel outposts, looks to it to come up with something better, but as all it had ever really done was trap lightning in a jar, all it could really do was go shopping for new jars, which is what it did.

Sarah played that day with blistering efficiency and lava soul. She rocked and she rolled and she flipped mohawks left to right and back again, conjuring a mosh pit that threatened to unlock the one with no bottom. Ollie, weary and dead of the journey, found his heart in hers and got a level up to beat the pixel off a fight game. She made it a show, and she made him make it a show.

Later, when the snow was mud from dancing and everyone was drunk and everything was stoned, they lay on the ground, oblivious to the stains and the cold. Sarah in Ollie’s arms, Ollie in hers.

“Where do we go from here?” Sarah said. “Art is our lives. What if we can’t kick without it?”

“So art dies,” Ollie said. “It’s just a word. As long as there’s something to say, someone will say it. Just won’t be called art. There won’t be anyone called artists, they’ll be called something else. But it’ll be the same shit.”

“You really think that?” Susan said. “We’ll still have something when the artist isn’t a thing anymore.”

“I do.” Ollie said. “I don’t think the artist was ever the art. It’s blood. It’s strongest when you can’t see it.”

Ollie rolled over, said what his persona would hide as the words of a wisdom eschewed, “They left it to the artists to change the world,” he said, “but they put the brushes and the bookstores in the hands of the politicians and the personalities with their platitudes. And art was pressed into whatever form they needed filled, forced to cry any message that could fit in their loudspeakers, and all that was left was the form, the aesthetic, the colors and the shapes, meaningless, talent to order, finding two-hundred-and-seventy ways to say not all that much.”

Ollie saw Sarah’s pupils dilate, and it pushed his blood harder, his thoughts on forward march to his mouth.

“Art drew the freaks and the castaways, and it nurtured them in their hardship, in their isolation, and it fought for them,” he continued. “And some saw the awesome power of that fight and offered safe harbor for the ones who fought, but for that safety, they demanded just a little bit of that fire. And before long the safety of the harbor became all there was, and the fire tamed, exchanged for community.”

Sarah stroked his hair. “Go on, my philosopher.”

Ollie chuckled. “That’s all I got,” he said. “Life’s a double cheeseburger with banana peppers. Fuck the world.”

Sarah laughed. “Now I want a cheeseburger. I would sell a painting for a cheeseburger.”

Ollie kissed her forehead. “It would be an estate sale.”

More from Liam Sweeny…