Trump is not the cause, he’s merely a symptom of a hysteria no one wants to acknowledge -- I hate to tell ya. The ultra wealthy are abusing the golden goose again, and she can’t take much more. People around here approach adulthood wondering who their highest bidder will be, grooming themselves to receive a higher station, a better income. It’s a stifling system that becomes more tenuous and uncertain the further down you go, and these days vast majorities groan under the downward pressure of wealth’s rampant consolidation, everyday watching while others slide over the edge.
Nowhere is the peasant’s nose pushed deeper into the manure pile than when it comes to big international art, visible for all to see. Here the super wealthy burn off excess cash like gas flares over oil refineries, wallowing in the guilt pit of pointless extravagance, and the financial manipulators climb aboard as well, seeing a chance to cover outright theft -- I must mean perfectly legal creative accounting, and everyone can see that too.
It’s a trifle, you’re likely to say. Surely job insecurity, fear of losing identity against competing ethnicities, and a shattering of traditional norms of behavior are all more important than what’s hanging on the wall. Maybe. On the other hand, a diet of fast food and the mental mayhem of action entertainment squanders human potential, who wants to disagree? If your tribe is warm and dry for a little longer, ignore these deficiencies while you can, but we float above a caldera of seething resentment, wasted talent, and stunted dreams, and that brings us back to art.
A sports poster on the wall isn’t a sufficient reflection of a fully formed adult personality, just isn’t. People could use a little affirmation of their own uniqueness, as well as a creative connection to the human condition. Why come to think of it, if we didn’t live in a culture starving for meaning, gasping for equitable distribution, and longing for an adequate education, we wouldn’t be in this fix, now would we? How much can we change by tomorrow?
None of it, but we can watch the system heal itself. The transformation will be expressed through art, harbinger of a general awakening. As a sign of this change, art would start going up on city walls all around the planet, a broad enough array for people to begin understand the power and potency of visual expression, and to find themselves in art. Leading businesses would endeavor to project a progressive yet mature image by owning and displaying worthy art, and a hotel chain might even arise requiring a premium price just to sleep in the same room with original art. Sounds like fantasy SF, or surely would have a couple of decades back, but seems a fairly safe bet by now, since it’s all happening already.
What change in mentality -- what new politics, morality, and self concept, both individually and collectively, would a renewed interest in visual art represent? More independence and self-reliance, along with a more humane and open relationship with other people would seem reasonable, and maybe even a path to self-realization and fulfillment would present itself. All in all, it suggests a future just a bit brighter than being reduced to the paranoid, shrunken, back-biting drones the oligarchs would prefer, inmates of a mind-control ant farm. They’ve used their money to elect Trump, to degrade us, to make us dumb -- resist with art.
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