We're all going to die, so please buy my art.

Today I went to the Madden Museum in Greenwood Village, to judge an art show by high school students. The Madden is what they sometimes refer to as a "vanity" museum; in this case, an enormous glass and steel structure built to house the legacy of a rich guy. The building is in Denver's sprawling suburban Tech Center, where gleaming corporate high rises thrust up from the prairie next to an eight lane highway. The name of the building is the Pallazzo Verdi, and the road that leads to it is called Fiddlers Green. Mind you, this is in suburban Denver. All of this would be easy to dismiss as irrelevant cultural grandstanding by yet another wealthy cowboy developer, were it not true that many important museums are vanity projects (think Marshall Field, JP Getty, Guggenheim), and that the Madden Museum houses some truly noteworthy pieces.

Twelve schools participated in the Continental League Art Exhibit, which is designed to showcase and reward excellence in the arts. Settling into the show, I found the usual scratchboard drawings of cats, and melodramatic self-portraits, but also some truly unexpected departures into combined media, and honest stabs at self discovery. A couple of the pieces felt vital, as if they not only mattered to their creators, but that they had the power to matter to passing strangers. It occurred to me that this is the best any artist could hope for.

My favorite moment came when I rounded a corner and saw an especially nice Robert Rauschenberg piece from the Madden's permanent collection that had been pushed into an unlit storage area to make room for the high school art show. I'm not sure if this was some sort of afterthought, or if I had arrived before they were finished moving things around, but if it were my museum, I'd make sure my blue chip art was either on a wall, or safely out of sight. Nonetheless, something about seeing the Rauschenberg there was both sad and wonderful, like the sight of dethroned royalty. The fact that it still projected a powerful presence from its dark corner made me like it all the more. The most surprising thing though, was seeing that the museum was willing to completely redefine itself to showcase the art of young people, many of whom are just beginning to suspect that art might be something of consequence to them.

Whether my artwork, or that of any of my artist friends, or the kids in this show will end up in someone's legacy, or in a thrift store, is anyone's guess. A friend of mine was recently tipped off that a painting by a well-known local artist was available at a certain thrift store for only a few bucks. The painting was quite nice, not to mention large, but whosever hands it had fallen into had failed to recognize anything of value in it. My friend rushed out and purchased the piece, which had the effect of not only restoring the work to a place of dignity, but my friend got a killer deal on it.

I own a bunch of art I'd like to think is notable. I've come to possess most of it by trading my own work with artists I admire. I've also got a couple of pieces I love, whose origins are obscure to me. One is a tiny painting of a face in profile being spoon-fed the word "never." I bought it from a college student who had taken only one painting class. That's all I remember. I liked the piece so much it didn't matter to me that I was pretty sure the girl who made it might never make another painting. It certainly wasn't an "investment."  I bought the painting for the simplest of reasons: it spoke to me. It could be that no one likes this painting as well as I do. Good. Then it has found its home. The best works of art contain their own justification, some little insight, or revelation, or just plain weirdness that will keep them out of dumpsters. This is perhaps more belief than fact, but I'll stick by it.

When I was in high school I made a painting of an old jalopy rusting under a tree and gave it to my Grandpa Baldy for his birthday. This was during my surly teen years, so any form of spontaneous generosity was a huge relief to my whole family. The painting was overtly sentimental and not at all original, but competently done, at least. I forgot about it entirely. At my grandpa's funeral a few years ago, the family presented the painting back to me. They told me it was Baldy's favorite painting (his only painting as far as I know), and then they took pictures of me holding it, which felt especially weird.

It took a few years, but eventually I found the exact right way to dispose of that painting. This is when I lived in North Carolina, where if you want to get rid of anything other than ordinary household waste, you have to drive it to the dump yourself. I used to go there a couple of times a month with various things that couldn't go out to the curb. The dump had an old gate keeper that wore the same brown Carharts every day. His job was to unlock the gate in the morning, keep an eye on whether things were being put in the proper dumpster, then lock the gate up at night. In his little guard shack I noticed he'd rescued a lot of objects: a vacuum cleaner, an old bendy pole lamp, a calendar picture with the months ripped off. On the day that I took the painting, I made sure it lay on the top of the "Misc Non-Metal" dumpster, face up and clearly visible. On my next visit to the dump I was happy to see it hanging in the guard shack, right where the calendar used to be. I knew the gatekeeper and could have just given him the painting directly, but I suspected that in his world, reclaiming the painting himself would have given it the right value.

Remember that maudlin 70's song Dust in the Wind? It's one hundred percent true, like it or not. Sooner or later, you, me, and everyone we've ever crossed paths with is going to vanish from this earth. This won't require an apocalypse, just the normal limits of mortality. In the big picture, this is all going to happen rather quickly. All of the things we've owned and made precious, all of the photos and half finished novels we've boxed away, all of it is going to be sorted through by people who won't have quite as much empathy as we'd like. Even our loved ones are going to throw most of our favorite things away.

The things you create, and the art you own (if any) will survive on their own merits. Some pieces may acquire rich histories and travel the world, others will slowly flake and peel in landfills. Either way, what happens is pretty much out of your control. Maybe you will be lucky and will get to leave a legacy. Maybe you will be especially lucky and have children who give a rat's ass about the same things you do. But for the rest of us, if art is going to matter, it will be right now that it does so. It will be because the things we create, and the objects we surround ourselves with help us discover who we are, while it still matters. So do what you can to buy the art that seems like it should belong to you. Especially if it's something that reaches into your psyche and gives it a good tweak. These are the pieces that will make your life just a little richer if you get them into your home. And some of them are going to keep working hard, delivering whatever experience they were designed to deliver, and will do fine on their own, long after you're gone.