A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Owning a thing of beauty, however, is perhaps more complicated.

Going to a gallery or a museum and looking at paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, etc., I often come away fulfilled and changed in a way that provokes in me great thought about aesthetics, the art market, the power of representation, any number of topics. There’s been an exchange between me and the things I’ve just seen. I feel like I carry away with me a little bit of the exhibit, or maybe I’ve left a little of myself behind, or both.

Sometimes I fantasize about taking a particular painting or drawing home with me. What a rich existence it would be to have an Ad Reinhardt, a William Blake, or a Louise Bourgeois hanging in my living room or bedroom, I think. I’d get up every day and look at it, resonate with its vibrations. My mortal coil thrumming and humming with the eternal music of the spheres, I’d be attuned to the universe and my surroundings in a profound and lasting way. Looking at it every day, I’d somehow master the work of art, know it intimately; it would be a part of me. It would be mine in a deeper way than mere ownership.

Actually bringing an Egon Schiele or a Richard Diebenkorn painting home and hanging it on my living room wall, though, could never live up to this fantasy. For the first few days or weeks, it would be something extraordinary, hovering over the room like a darkly beautiful angel, but after a while, its ability to charm me all the time would wear thin. It would be another decoration that I only partially see, existing among the clutter, the piles of partially-read copies of The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, the dust, the dying flowers, the cat hair and cob webs. Occasionally I’d be arrested by the sight of it and marvel at my great good fortune to own it, but I’d never have the time to look at it, really to look at and fully understand it.

In fact, every time I’d look at this hypothetical masterpiece, I’d feel that there’s so little that I understand about it that instead of mastering it, it has mastered me. I’d look at it and see myself as a tiny blip in the painting’s history, flitting around in front of it as it stares out on the world with a truly long view. After my mortal coil has ceased humming and thrumming, it will still be around, intimidating someone else with its ineffable presence.

I know that this is what would happen because it’s what *has* happened to me with the art that I own. At times it is lost in the shuffle of my everyday life, becoming part of the humdrum. Occasionally, though, it jumps out at me and makes me wonder about the source of its power. I’ll stare and think about what it means to “own” an artwork. How deeply satisfying it should be, but how much I end up feeling like the Duke in Robert Browning’s poem. No, not a murderer, but someone who tries to gather importance to himself from his art collection, but it doesn’t bring him any closer to wisdom. All his proclamations of taste and appreciation simply point up how everything he owns just slips through his fingers.

. . . Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

All the same, how about a little tour of some of the highlights of my art collection? It seems very strange to say or write such a phrase, but I have managed to amass enough to call it that. Most of what I own I received as gifts, many from the artists themselves; I’ve only bought a few things, generally because I usually can’t afford it.

Here’s my favorite, a painting called “Headlong.” I saw it in a coffee shop a few years ago and was struck by it immediately, indelibly. It was very affordable, so I bought it.

Later, I bought another painting by the same artist as a gift for Jen. It’s more or less the first thing you see when you walk in our front door.

Not long ago I ran into the artist, Chiara Merlotti, at a friend’s book reading. She sighed when I showed her a picture of “Headlong” on my cell phone camera. It occurred to me how much the painting remains hers and how little I really know about it.

My parents gave me this carving of a cat by Laverne Kelley, who was a dairy farmer and folk artist who carved and painted models and figures in his spare time. He did farm machinery, animals, strangely blocky people, cows, whatever he saw. When he was in his 60s, he was “discovered” by a gallery owner in my hometown and became something of a minor regional celebrity, collected by my parents and Harvey Fierstein alike.

Many people are creeped out by this carving, but I like it a great deal. It reminds me of the mystical, totemic powers many people ascribe to representation. When I look closely at Kelley’s sculpture, I feel like I am becoming cat.

One of the most prominent (and probably valuable) pieces of art I own is not representational at all. It’s an Amish quilt, another gift from my parents. It hangs in our bedroom.

Most days I probably look at it for less than a total of a minute or two, but occasionally I’ll get lost in following its patterns and stitching. The colors are both vibrant and strangely soothing. It reminds me that the urge to decorate is deep within us.

The urge to do something was deep inside the artist who drew this, but I’m not quite sure what. Is it an unfinished love letter? A looming threat? What does it mean to “lurk in beauty”? Was she (presumably she) making a twisted, dark literary allusion? These questions will sadly never be answered, for the drawing goes unsigned. A friend found this in a school textbook, framed it, and gave it to me for my birthday one year.

I’ll wind it all up with a bit of a miscellany, a melange of the decorative and the artistic.

Among the dried flowers in antique bottles, postcards, toys and other things here are three collages. Jen’s friend Michelle made the one on the upper shelf, and our pal Uncle Scotty made the two on the lower one, glorious gifts that I will treasure forever. I look at them and sometimes I can almost grasp what I’m seeing.