Fringe | Contemporary Artist

Blog 29/9. Art gives one a simple life. Not really. It’s something you have to master. Like walking to the corner shop for supplies.

I did it twice this week and it felt so retro. I had to remind myself that I’m not an artist who arrives at events in a limousine. I’m just a regular guy doing regular things, meandering around the neighbourhood while deep in the throes of a solitary existential debate — with myself.

This week I was wondering whether Goldilocks is exclusive to planet Earth. When the aliens pull in, I thought, it’s not going to make much sense to tell them everything is so good here because of the Goldilocks effect. They probably don’t have children’s storybooks anyway.

Although, if aliens have a nurturing tendency, maybe they tell their children stories about other children who survived terrible danger. Maybe they have an alien Goldilocks who wanders into the breakfast room of another species and eats their porridge.

It turns out Goldilocks has had quite a career outside the forest. Scientists use the idea of ‘just right’ to describe everything from planets that are the right distance from their stars to babies paying attention to things that are neither too simple nor too complicated.

There’s even a Goldilocks economy, which makes me wonder about art.

Is there a sweet spot where an artwork is neither too hot nor too cold? Too obvious, too obscure. Too polished, too rough? Perhaps the trick is that ‘just right’ doesn’t mean safe. It means alive.

So maybe Goldilocks wasn’t looking for the perfect bowl of porridge after all. Maybe she was looking for the exact point where things get interesting.

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