"Art" and friendship

I saw the play Art by Yasmina Reza last week. It is a neat story executed beautifully and actually less complex than I expected it to be. There is a lot of humour and many good lines in it. Three old friends go on a roller coaster of their friendship over the purchase of a very expensive minimalist white painting (a white canvas essentially) by one of them. The play starts on discussions of subjectivity of art and its value and very quickly moves to the psyche of friendship, and the battle of the egos.

The line that stood with me the most is "do you love me because of who I am, or because of who you are". In other words, in our friendships do we like the other person because of them, or because of how they make us feel about ourselves. Perhaps it is a mixture of both for many people. To me it is also the dance between the ego and the alter-ego; and aren't we all aiming to be our alter-egos eventually? Does this mean that a mature and complete friendship would be one where we love the other person for who they are and not necessarily for how they make us feel?

I had a clarifying conciliatory email exchange with a close friend today over a misunderstanding we had that we each in turn had hurt the other one. The misunderstanding was simple, I had said something in a tone that didn't sit well with my friend, and my friend had in return said something that did not sit well with me! Does that mean we are still not merged with our alter-egos and that our friendship is based on how we make each other feel? perhaps.

Art goes to a more radical place in the stirring of the friendship of these men where they actually question why they are friends, what keeps them together, and how they became friends in the first place. I personally believe in 'unconditional friendship' where there is no balance-sheets and where there is ample emotional generosity.

Art ends on another concept that I particularly ponder upon: perception is reality and does the truth really matter?

At the height of the friends' fighting over their friendship, Serge who has spent $40K on the white painting, asks Mark (the critic of the purchase and the piece) to draw on the painting with a marker. Mark draws a skier coming down a snowy hill. Later they 'find out' that the marker was erasable and so they erase the skier. Mark now connects to the white painting because 'the skier is an astronaut who has flown in the skies' by his interpretation. He never finds out about the fact that Serge knew about the erasable marker! Now is that Serge's genious to save the painting and the friendship or is that a lie? I think it is the 'white' lie that we should be allowed to say to whiten things up and keep friendships that are not yet based on the alter-egos thriving!


More on Yasmina Reza and Art: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/yasmina_reza/index.html