If the nutrition could be drained out of food and be replaced with some sort of vegetable/animal dreck from stainless steel holding tanks, would it be offered to the masses as food, and would they eat it? Yes, they would for a while, but they’d catch on. They’d see themselves turning to lard and start demanding green stuff, a calorie count on the menu, and fewer “additives” all around. It’s happening now.
If those same commercial wizards could siphon off the humanity, the ingenuity, the art in art, and replace it with brand-name shoddy sensationalism, reducing art in the process to a game token, a trading card, a sideshow entertainment, would they? Oh, they’d try -- lowering everyone’s gaze by demeaning their aspirations and their expectations of themselves, reducing their sole expressions of self to the right brand of beer. For them art becomes a souless commodity without a face or content, just a name, just an autograph to be traded up or down, an empty beachhead for phony conversation.
That's too bad because we could use something better. Does anyone else feel themselves in the tow of a sucking vortex of occupational dementia, reducing thoughts to emoticons, chewing through the attention span, turning everything grey making everything taste the same? Are we going to just keep turning up the volume? If we could see ourselves as our perceptual interfaces with the world, we wouldn’t be fat – we’d be skinny, skinny and pale. Perceptually speaking, we’re hardly here at all – media-impaired zombies flickering as we walk. Does art cure it? Well, no, doesn’t cure, just provides the vitamins to fight back, the exercise to lift our heads, and it scrapes the scales from our eyes so we can see.
If those same commercial wizards could siphon off the humanity, the ingenuity, the art in art, and replace it with brand-name shoddy sensationalism, reducing art in the process to a game token, a trading card, a sideshow entertainment, would they? Oh, they’d try -- lowering everyone’s gaze by demeaning their aspirations and their expectations of themselves, reducing their sole expressions of self to the right brand of beer. For them art becomes a souless commodity without a face or content, just a name, just an autograph to be traded up or down, an empty beachhead for phony conversation.
That's too bad because we could use something better. Does anyone else feel themselves in the tow of a sucking vortex of occupational dementia, reducing thoughts to emoticons, chewing through the attention span, turning everything grey making everything taste the same? Are we going to just keep turning up the volume? If we could see ourselves as our perceptual interfaces with the world, we wouldn’t be fat – we’d be skinny, skinny and pale. Perceptually speaking, we’re hardly here at all – media-impaired zombies flickering as we walk. Does art cure it? Well, no, doesn’t cure, just provides the vitamins to fight back, the exercise to lift our heads, and it scrapes the scales from our eyes so we can see.
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