art's part -- the organic root

A terrible event has happened, terrible enough to overcome the calloused threshold of our attention. For a flashbulb moment we see the landscape we inhabit. With that sudden objectivity it should be possible to see much of what we call entertainment in this culture is simply psychotic, and should only appeal to psychopaths. It’s being made by perfectly sane artist-professionals who have hired out to sell stuff, and they lie about reality to stimulate artificial needs. Inevitably total immersion commercialism is dragging the entire society down to a lowest denominator lizard mentality. The collateral effect is to make our common daily experience kinda creepy and weird, and that’s being nice.

I wouldn’t claim special knowledge, but don’t tell me art doesn’t profoundly affect the everyday. Yes, what you look at, choose to look at, shapes the world you live in and it doesn’t matter which old book you find it in. Our present-day direction doesn’t disagree. Independent artists, many currently employed in other areas, offer personal interventions to this price-is-right stampede toward degradation but so far society has pretty much ignored them. Art on the wall is more potent in the long run than flickering view screens, and if the artist has more to say than just give me money it will seem like fresh air every time you look at it.

Picasso's economy

Once in Los Angeles I saw a Picasso painting -- a woman’s head, as placid and monumental as a Greek statue, and up close it was made with a single line and maybe a thimble full of sepia on a white ground. No mistakes, no restarts, not the slightest stray mark anywhere. It was like seeing a tight rope walker poised above a waterfall, the matador kissing the bull on the forehead frozen forever there on a museum wall. Chinese court painters of a thousand years ago would have been knocked out if they’d had a chance to see it. It’s the one piece I remember after all day looking at art.