I found the gambling where you don’t lose money – bidding on jewelry on ShopGoodwill.com. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires, aquamarines – I learned what spinel is from this site- all of which you can bid on, and have someone who’s probably a professional jewelry outbid you at the last possible second. This hobby is partially motivated by my more raccoon tendencies: the desire to have beautiful object. But the uncertainty of online purchasing keeps me bidding only what I can afford to lose, and so I lose the auctions. This morning I work with the disappointment of a white sapphire teardrop ring going to someone else. It wasn’t my size, or I would have bid more. Or maybe just lost it at a higher price point. I did win a Russian pocket watch, gold tone with a ruby, the other day. I treasure it – I put it on a chain and realized I need reading glasses.

The impulse that brings me to Goodwill seeking jewelry is the same that pulls me to Instagram (most of the strangers I follow are local artists) or into the street on my lunchbreak, drawn towards the lake or one of downtown’s art galleries – I am hungering for beauty.

Buffalo has months of gray weather and an abundance of bad news, but it can also feed an appetite for the lovely reasonably well. Downtown is full of Art Deco buildings, the neighborhoods full of the architecture of the late 1800s and early 1900s. We have so many parks. We have a Great Lake. We have art. We have murals! We have so many murals. At one point it seemed like a new one was going up every other week, another piece of art to interrupt your errands and ask you to consider what this aesthetic statement may be trying to tell you.

We have the AKG and the Burchfield Penney (right across the street from each other!), and so many commercial art galleries and shops. We have community art efforts. A friend and I just took part in one run by Crucible last month. The only criteria was that it was 5X7 and hand-made. We showed up to a gallery of hundreds of submissions of mostly impressive talent, given freely because the artists could.

Two prominent Buffalo artists were murdered in their home – Mickey Harmon and Jordan Celotto. To state the obvious: what a [expletive] tragedy! It still feels unreal. I can only imagine how their closest loved ones feel, and I hope the outpouring of admiration from the community is giving them comfort. If you’re not from Buffalo – these fellows were pretty much either the friend, or the friend-of-a-friend, of folks in the art, queer, or bicycling communities. Prominent but without the distance that famous people have. We are a very small city. Many people have first hand experience of their cultural contributions – Celotto was a DJ and artist and Harmon was prolific as an artist. Then they had their day jobs too. They were both anchors of the LGBTQIA+ community artistically and socially – organizing events (especially if the pre-existing ones were perceived to be serving some sort of hierarchical purpose) and being who they are.

One of Harmon’s frequent subjects was his love of Buffalo – the city was his inspiration, his subjects, and his canvas. Harmon’s style was distinctive and prolific. You could tell if a piece was Harmon’s in part because you had so much practice seeing his work on the sides of buildings, in galleries, and in people’s possession.

It’s seemed to me that a defining characteristic of Buffalo’s art and literature scenes, our Art World in the Becker sense, is that our cultural products are for and by us. Buffalo’s art is often a conversation in Buffalo by Buffalonians about Buffalo. See Joe George or Jillian Hanesworth or some of Chris Fritton’s work or the very existence of Silo City. (I’d locate my own cultural contributions to this genre too.) Art isn’t bigger than we are, it is not separate from us.

Art is different than the pursuit of beautiful objects. That teardrop sapphire ring is not mine – it was an object to possess at the right price, which I did not pay. Harmon’s artistic legacy? I will be walking the streets that the murals face, living in his muse, and noticing many of the same things that inspire his critique. Though I physically own only a couple pieces of Harmon’s work, it is part of my city. It feels like something we now collectively have, a gift given to us. What a beautiful legacy! (…that should have been left to us 40-50 years in the future, not now…)

When people are looking at the world around them, feeling powerless to make it better, art is proof that there’s always a way. Changing the organization of society to something better is long, slow work. Art is something you can contribute to the project – especially in a city like Buffalo. Art is efficacy to influence our culture. Let’s make this place more beautiful.