greeting card art -- bending reality

Let’s go all the way back. We live with larceny as a fact of life thanks to Santa, the first lie, and the best lie because it conditions what we expect from the universe thereafter. Adults conspire to tell children, so trusting, so innocent, a sugary-sweet falsehood about how it all works here, and then lets each just figure it out for themselves, coming alone to the realization it’s not going to be that great. Done right, most effectively by parents but the whole town colludes, they won’t really ever trust anyone again, and may not be trustworthy themselves. Jolly old Santa is a hollow image, in everyone’s mind little more than nineteenth century greeting card art, but if you believed in him even a little you haven’t quite gotten over it yet. Art has great power, and totalitarian regimes have believed, even overtly stated, that art helps shape the world, trying to control it through brutal censorship. Does art really influence how we see everything around us, I don’t know, but corporate reliance on advertising art means big business believes it too.

Good or bad, that’s not the point. If it works, if reality can be altered, even influenced to the slightest degree, by what we choose to see, the question becomes why aren’t we sailing our own ship instead of caught like a leaf in the swirling media wind. What if the same consciousness people have recently applied to the food they consume leaked over into an awareness of how visual images influence what and how they see, what they think, even who they are? Fresh off the vine, close to home, full of unshipped, totally natural nutrition can make us healthier and extend our lives, so the farmers say, and lots of health professionals chime in, it’s a movement. If we were equally concerned with what we see, we’d be able to at least supplement the daily barrage of empty calories streaming from our devices with a few works of art, enduring and reassuring, like vitamins each morning.

Deep down you might still be pissed at Santa’s candy cane betrayal, even if you've forgotten your disappointment that the tinsel, colored lights, and oodles free stuff were just a charade. By now you’ve come to the realization that real life requires hard work and compromise, and that humiliation and defeat will be in your stocking if you don’t keep up. You’re more mature, ready to make your own choices about art that more accurately portrays life as we find it and our place in it. Art up on the wall will balance your day, so good to come home to.