time - it won’t hurry

Time is the magic ingredient. You can come up with the best invention, sing the most beguiling song, have the perfect body but if you’re not there at the right time, week, day, and hour the train won’t stop. Actually cool stuff is around all the time, but the public’s attention is like a flashlight in Pharaoh’s tomb and can’t take in too much all at once. If you see the beam of light swinging your direction dream of the stars, but it’s a lucky few who show up just at the right moment.

Back in the fifties a new breed of hucksters realized they could bend the public attention beam with clever advertising delivered through rapidly expanding mass media. They applied a simple formula which combined grinding repetition with an inch by inch violation of convention, and it worked for everything. It’s good for selling trucks and shampoo, burgers and art. It has the unfortunate side-effect of turning everyone into pigs. Well, it’s better to be a happy human than a dissatisfied pig, and a whole lot of people are getting that feeling now. It’s about time.

There’s not much convention left to violate. On TV barely legal, almost naked girls are orally sodomized by double cheeseburgers, they seem to love it, and visual art has been through so many ironies and appropriations it’s been reduced down to spots. At some point public attention will realize it’s been binging -- wake up in an alley, dust itself off, and go home. The new economy will belong to a more self-possessed population that understands the temporal fragility of good times and who will be less likely to be led over a cliff to make others rich.

What it means for art is hard to say, but it’s probably a better time to be an artist than it has been for a while. The public attention is scattered, but as corrupt dynasties crumble it’s free to find its own way and it just might wake up with the ravenous appetite of the finally sober drunk.