Connections/Endings

I'm Chris Coulson, senior advisor to the Director, and my topic is "Endings."

I like that moment in the movies where the screen goes black and you're suspended between the world of the film and the reality that's going to return when the lights go up.

When the curtain goes up at the opera, I'm always the one weeping in the audience, because of the sheer performance of it all.

And I feel the same way about words. I love short stories, because they can end at any moment.

There's that tension of the last line possibly being on the next page.

People make a lot of the first line of novels. I disagree.

The last line is your legacy.

The all-American ending: the great cliché of the cowboy riding off into the horizon. Those billowing clouds and all his testosterone pumping. I don't think real endings are always that tidy or romantic. Artists

bring to endings a sense of poetry that doesn't really exist in real life. They can couch it in narrative

they can think about it as legacy. They can

show things with a simultaneity that doesn't exist

in real time. And it's very convenient.

There's a long tradition of people being comforted by images that

help them through that finality, through their own mortality.

This incredible carpet of people in London marking Armistice Day. Imagine being with that many human beings in total silence.

You're celebrating the end of the war, but you're also recognizing what was lost. And as happy as you are that it's over, so much has changed to so many lives.

The Dead Confederate Soldier is brutal and powerful death in its most raw, wartime way. The polar opposite of that

the very formal and staged Death of Socrates. When I was ten, I secretly wrote a book called, "A Decade of Me," in which I inserted myself into paintings and this was my final picture

me on my bed in a toga. If it were today I would probably be sent to therapy immediately. It seemed the right ending at the time.

Egyptian death doesn't seem to be about endings at all, I mean their afterlife is so well-provided for, beautifully provided for

that it seems quite attractive to reach your end, as the beginning of something probably much more palatable than life itself. I could buy into that.

There's a great tradition of ending all sorts of activities with a cigarette. This man clearly has achieved something. His self-possession and his posture just signal victory.

Sinister endings. This necklace is called The Jealous Husband. It's an apt title. These sharp pieces would frame the woman's face so no one else could get near her.

Thinking about when the artists themselves think they're finished.

Morris Louis's painting ends when gravity takes the paint to its limit off the canvas.

I like to think that Sargent waited until the end to paint Madame X's diamond ring. Somehow he had to make sure it showed up on her very pale skin.

That gleaming dash of white paint he scraped across right out of the tube. I like to think that was the final flourish, and then he was done. There's a moment

at the end of any successful artistic endeavor in which the audience is

so absorbed that when it's over, they need to disconnect, recalibrate. That

precious time, it's brief but it's very powerful. That's what you want again, that's why you open the next book, that's why you go to the museum, why you go see the next movie.

It's very addictive.