Trump doesn’t act like a politician, everyone agrees. He foments bullshit and then gets headlines across the board when he renounces it. He puffs imaginary mole-hills into luminous clouds, and goes up in polls. His ripe idiocy is dissected and scrutinized, made substantial by the sheer volume of attention it receives. I’m beginning to suspect he’s really a contemporary artist, Christo bow down.
Dada, the art movement, produced a wave of irreverent irrationality that has finally seeped out into the everyday, and many of Trump’s supporters know full well he could never run the country. Like the people who rig their diesel pickups to put out extra black smoke, a vote for Trump is a big ‘fuck you’ to common interests -- just as the soup cans were to everyone who thought they liked art about a generation back. This gleeful welcoming of the apocalypse, popular culture leaping for a sinking raft, reeks of decadence and dead-ends don’t you think?
Consider the politician you’d prefer, you can use your imagination, and then try to figure out what that would look like as art, consider rational and accessible, competent yet visionary. Whatever art you wind up with will be a reflection of your own character and aspiration, reassuring to yourself and a quiet declaration to others who see it. Politics and art are not disconnected, spokes on the same wheel actually, and it may be time to get serious about what we look at every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment