Ephemeral Art

The thing about sand sculpture and sand painting - it just doesn't last. O, I guess you could spray it with something. You could maybe keep the art from blowing or washing away. I suppose you could even make a casting of it and send it to a museum, but you'd still be missing something.

It's the very impermanence of it all that makes it so compelling. It's the very exacting and painstaking skills of the artists, combined with the inevitable destruction, that makes it so profoundly playful, so deeply spiritual, so thoroughly fun. Take a look, for example, at this collection of sand sculpture links from the always remarkable Grow-a-Brain weblog. And then also maybe take a look at this collection of Tibetan sand paintings. Kind of a deeper fun, I grant you, yet, for all the painstaking , still made to blow away into time and memory.

Which is what games are. And sports to a maybe lesser degree (with all the pictures and videos and stuff) are. And music and theater (especially when we're all musicians and actors). Uncollectable art. Vanishing art, art that in its very disappearance becomes forever embedded in the soul. Fun.