 Good morning Hickets Tuesday. So before Sarah and I were married, and before we were dating, we were friends. And one evening in like 2003, we were hanging out at her apartment and she showed me some of her recent paintings. They were mostly paintings of lines, and they made me think about how it's actually impossible to draw a straight line, because both the hand and the paint are imprecise and unpredictable. Anyway, I liked them a lot, and so I asked Sarah if I could buy a painting, and she gave me a painting, this painting, for the friends and family discounted price of $50. So I went home, got the painting framed, and put it up in my apartment. Oh God, uh oh. I'm sorry, I feel an advertisement coming on. Now people are gonna say, John you're 45, don't take this risk, but I'm gonna take it. Did you know that the awesome socks club is taking subscribers again? My brother's wild idea of reinventing the sock business by allowing people to have amazing socks and donating 100% of the proceeds to charity has exploded. We've got ankle socks, we've got regular socks, link in the doobly-doo, use my affiliate link, not Hank's, because he's already had a lot of sales. Alright, thanks to awesomesocks.club for sponsoring today's video is what I would say if this had actually been a paid advertisement. Right, so I get the painting frame and I put it up in my apartment, here's what it looked like. I loved looking at this painting. It kind of reminded me of the paths, raindrops, traces. They slide down a window, and I just loved how the lines got denser, closer to the middle, and how they even sometimes converged. Now, observant viewers will have already identified the issue, but I certainly didn't. I just liked the painting. In fact, looking at it now, I still love it. I'm reminded of the veins of a ginkgo leaf, how they approach each other without ever becoming each other. Anyway, a few months after I hung up the painting, Sarah came over to my apartment and let me know in the politest way possible that I had hung it upside down. In fact, it was supposed to look like this, which now that I look at it is probably better. Like, this way it reminds me of the great Flannery O'Connor title, Everything That Rises Must Converge. In the years since we've hung the painting at multiple orientations, like, recently it's been in my office sideways, so the lines now seem to me like distant mountain ranges, or rows of crops in far off fields. I've been thinking about this partly because news recently broke that a Piet Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down in a German art museum for 75 years. Now, the story, like a lot of stories, turns out to be much more complicated than its headline. The piece was unfinished. Mondrian was probably working on it when he died, and he was known to work on things upside down or sideways on his easel, and because the piece is unfinished and unsigned, it's impossible to know how Mondrian would have wanted the painting oriented. As the museum's director put it, we cannot know what is correct or incorrect, which is a great sentence, one that I should utter more often. But I'm also thinking about the upside down Sarah painting because it's a reminder to me that art can bring wonder and pleasure in unexpected ways, and whether the artist intended each possible road to wonder is not as important as whether a viewer can find that wonder. Art that is created only for the person who created it can be great and valuable, but art that is created to be shared is inherently a collaboration. It is a commingling of the artist's attention and the viewer's attention. The work of art is the place where those attentions come together. I think for art to work it has to involve mutual generosity. The making of the work is a gift to an audience, and in turn the audience's attention is a gift to the artist. This gift exchanges at the center of how I understand art, and 19 years on I find that this painting continues to reward my attention no matter its orientation in new and thrilling ways to such a degree that at this point we cannot know what is correct or incorrect. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.