art as antidote -- modern addictions

I’ve wandered far far away from what other people say about art, on a different page in a different book. Well fine, no reason to avoid the obvious. I’ll try to be explicit, make the differences indelible, setting out to homestead in unclaimed territory. I begin with the notion that we are by nature ‘sight' animals, with half of the brain’s mass and a large percentage of its circuitry devoted to deciphering vision, so say TV documentaries, but the necessities of modern life insist we think and write in words, strings of abstract symbols that represent reality. Written information comes in through the eyes, but is routed through much less complex hearing circuits, like spoken words. A practical adaptation no doubt, but it’s going to leave a lot of unused capacity, tiers of vacant rooms in everyone’s mansion, levels of feeling and thinking, attitudes and responses that don’t squeeze down into words.

Along with this notion of non-verbal areas of awareness and communication, I’ll also have to admit that my ideas about art history sound like science fiction. No need for the intervention of aliens, it’s just the artists changing the whole world by altering the way everyone sees it. Painters in the renaissance didn’t ‘discover’ perspective, whatever that means. They absorbed Aristotle’s world view, a logical system of cause and effect, and then they ‘converted’ everyone else who saw their paintings. This new way of seeing, and thinking, granted europeans a huge tactical advantage over the rest of the world for several centuries, trade and warfare, science and art. Even though modern culture is much more diverse, this technique should be as potent today, and by now it’s in the public domain, free to use.

Can't help but be automatically suspicious of governments wanting to be involved with art, at all, let them tend to other matters. In totalitarian regimes attempting mind-control, artists are harassed and worse, while in democracies team players are smothered with love, encouraged with grants and stipends to dive deep in the weeds, national endowments sponsoring art nobody wants, even justifying government participation solely because no one else would pay for it. Well meaning, perhaps, but art produced on a salary is incentivized all wrong, producing instead havens for mediocrity. It’s predictable enough, just the standard government paycheck ‘no one rocks the boat’ complicity setting in.

I’m also not pretending to be smarter than the people I grew up with. Some might be limited regarding art, painting in particular, but at the far end of national culture, in a state that traditionally lags, it’s possible to think average citizens may have been cheated, groomed to consume, with soup cans to represent art, so sad. Here’s where it gets crazy. I think original art calls to them, and when enough local art displayed where the public can see it, they’ll start to respond, that means by buying it. This supposes there’s a thirst for honest direct expression, perhaps the part that’s been missing, and that common folk will start to realize it, just by seeing a heartfelt and unpretentious art. For sure, it’s not coming out of a phone. Thought of this way, art is the antidote for chronic sense overload, medicine for our media addictions, and a distant call to wakeup while we slumber, morning on its way, anyway.