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In the nineteen-eighties, the world was a smaller, more admirable place. When standing in my Grandfather’s fields, I had no reason to wonder whether or not I was experiencing an old-fashioned form of the traditional sublime, or mere nostalgia as I might today. And if I could have arrived at an answer then, I would have never thought to ask myself where today’s true beauty and the contemporary sublime are to be found, as I must now.

And standing in those fields, had I been mature enough to call them beautiful, I would still be entirely unaware of the assault beauty, in its varied forms, would soon endure in the name of Damisch, Derrida, others long dead, and the remarkably marketable avant-garde. If another had mentioned in that moment that the view I stood atop was part of a vaguely sexist and transcendental belief system now debunked, I’d have laughed like a child at the nonsense for which I’d have had no explanation or understanding.

Though I lived during a time in which science could explain not only how small I was, but how miniscule all that lay before me would always be, I somehow lacked the arrogance of an educated adult to act as if I understood the dictated realm of ‘knowledge’ that asks me to abandon that Western vista for one more cautious, correct, and most of all, inward. I was boyish in my take on things, and being nothing more than a boy, that was easily excused.

Between chores and fences on the Ranch, my Father once told me that my boots were not authentic, as we walked across such endless places. What’s authentic? I asked, wondering about the word’s meaning just as I do today. And at some point between the conclusion of my three-foot-tall question and his plain-stated answer, I stepped squarely into a cow-pattie, circular and warm, steaming. Now they are, he said, with a smirk and authority.

If standing in those dimming, fleeting fields of the South Dakota Eighties, I knew what I know now, I might never have invested in the endeavor to which I am now so inextricably and gladly tied. Back then, to my limited understanding, authenticity had something to do with honesty and the genuine. And now, to many shallow artists and critics, it’s the word for that which I find so perverse and convoluted by comparison to what we’d really like to say or see that it’s a quality hardly worth pursuing. Now the ‘authentic’ institution calls for austere and unknowable art, impeccably crafted photographs of unloved ugly girls, dada gone wild, and anything else, really—save a nostalgic hankering for the past, or an honest plain-framed beauty.

If there, in the dirt and distance of Perkins County, knowing what I do today, I could have seen the scientists, the professors, the gallerists, critics, curators, and even the over-zealous snapshot commentators of my future, I’d have done what any wise boy ought to. I’d have casually cordoned off a chunk of stiff arm for each of them, and asked that they stand clear of the view. Sadly, wisdom is not for boys.

Thankfully however, I’m still a boy, capable of such ignorance and beauty. And someday, in a future just as distant as today once was to a shorter boy in bigger fields, wisdom, maybe.