Art Review: Enrique Martinez Celaya

Celaya's "On Worth" presentation was captivating. His ideas about the worth of art and the art community immediately struck a chord with me--I didn't even need to see his own work or hear about his background before being convinced of his authority. Ross introduced Celaya as his favorite graduate student, and I can see why. After immigrating from Cuba, studying physics at Cornell and Berkeley, and finally coming to study art at UCSB, Celaya already had a diverse array of inspirations before abandoning his prior dreams to become an artist. He doesn't like to be labeled, and such an aversion to cookie-cutter conformity is obvious through his wide range in painting, sculpture, photography, poetry and more.

While his slideshow presentation was brief, the Q&A afterward was what really intrigued me. He had so much to say about how the field of art has become self-referential. The only people who actually care about art are within the art community. Art does not have the same respected authority of the sciences, and it has pushed itself to the fringes out of fear of seeming pretentious. An artist can never know if they are right or wrong and should always be stuck in a cycle of desperation. These are only a few of his ideas, and I can assure you that he put them much more eloquently than I ever could. Part of the reason I admire his work is because he recognized that leaving the sciences to pursue art was a crazy ambition and yet he did it anyway. He went against the desires of his parents and took up a skill that has no clear direction or salary. People constantly ask me what I can do with an art major once I graduate, and I honestly don't know. But Celaya assured us that's not about being a "starving artist" but rather constantly aiming at a higher goal. One of my favorite things he said was this: "Failure is much more common than success. You might as well fail for things that really matter. It is hard to keep your life fulfilled with little targets.” I want to take my art to the next level, and I'm going to use every opportunity to shoot at a bigger, greater target.