blowing up temples -- killing art

Fact is greek and roman temples have suffered over the ages. The temple complex at Delphi, with architectural representations of the ancient world’s classic civilizations, was thrown down by early christians for the same reasons that motivate the muslims of today, and can you blame them really? Illiterate, living in hovels without modern conveniences, and here they are confronted with enduring evidence of people who were smarter, more talented, and more advanced than they’ll ever be. In dumb frustration they lash out, blow stuff up just to not be reminded of what end of human existence they occupy. 

So human it’s disgusting to see and one of our less attractive characteristics, destruction becomes a sort of aggressive envy we know too well. It’s part of our basic issue and fuels petty resentments, jealousies, and vindictive little knife-fights the live-long day. It becomes visible when it comes to art. The destroyed temples didn’t represent function, their gods having moved out a couple millennia back, and without roofs they’d let in the rain that never falls. Out of the stone of the earth they were made purely as art, columns so perfect they were still standing, and the statement they made about human possibility went way beyond holding up a roof.

Drawing a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, submitting a urinal to serious art competition, dismissing historical representational art as prosaic and imitative turn out to be a similar cultural vandalism, all acts of ‘anti-art’ committed by notorious egoist, Marcel Duchamp, self-aware enough to realize his own limitations. What’s left after his ‘redefining influence’ is the rubble of intellectual property, the shredded integrity of attribution, a denial of archival responsibility, along with a haughty contempt for common culture -- fragments of a worthy artistic heritage here and there poking through the soup can miasma. The good news is that art is immortal, doesn’t need a temple, and will survive the temporary distortions of market manipulation and government interferences, no matter how demeaning or exclusionary.

Authentic art which represents a community sensibility comes not from the artists, so many willing to submit their talent to any wind that blows, but from the people who in the end decide what they want, and it’s coming. Simple exposure will resurrect an interest in owning and living with art, igniting a chain-reaction of acquisition, while connecting the names of area artists to their characteristic style of expression. When enough original art is available, the machinery of commerce will crank up and average folks will self-educate, begin to have favorites, and decide what they want for the house. Artists will have the ability to survive outside the state system, and there’ll be something else to talk about at social gatherings now that the basketball team never loses.