The culture goes downhill, expectations plummet, fast food becomes the national cuisine. Over a certain age and you begin to notice, literary icon Hemingway who wrote books is replaced by Stan Lee, a drawer of comics, and Miles Davis gives way to Snoop. It’s all a matter of taste, of course, but certain human values may be lost in the carnage of modern entertainment, the short-cut simplification of traditional moral narrative by fresh-faced teens with super-powers. Makes a person wonder, just what the hell is going on?
Looks like commercialism, with a price tag on everything, has been dragging down our common denominator with crime and hateful emotions on the television every night. It’s nothing sinister, just trying to sell more trucks and beer is all. Football players on the field risk life-long debility and even their sanity, while the commentators, ignoring the game, are discussing contracts and options, and rank players against their salaries instead of other players. CEO’s piss away loot on stuff they don’t need just to impress their peers, and the quality of art is supposed to depend on what someone else, with more money than you, is willing to pay for it. No one really cares what’s on the front.
Can’t stop it, can’t slow it down, better stand aside. The embodiment of unbridled amoral enterprise, foreshadowed incidentally by art in the eighties, has risen to head of state, and an unhinged bifurcating hysteria stalks the land. If history works at all, it’s about time to take a new grip on reality, to find something positive and good to cling to, perhaps to look around for a signpost that leads out of this swamp. Here we come to an interesting and open question about art -- is art active or passive? Does art reflect or does it inspire, and is it the result, or the cause, of change?
Can an evolving national mood channel itself through working artists in their studios, influencing their work in ways even they might not fully understand? Well, yeah, actually, that does seem possible, and the example cited above just confirms it. Painting may seem an archaic form but there’s more of it all the time, on the sides of buildings, even as an excuse to drink wine, and it’s being seen more often in businesses that are open to the public. Oddly enough, it turns out the time-binding duration of original art has become more significant as the world trends toward one-use disposable, digital volatility. Just the artifact of that much concentrated human effort, and the anguished, perhaps only half-successful attempt to get through to you, has a value of its own, and if you also like the picture, it’s a bonus.
Looks like commercialism, with a price tag on everything, has been dragging down our common denominator with crime and hateful emotions on the television every night. It’s nothing sinister, just trying to sell more trucks and beer is all. Football players on the field risk life-long debility and even their sanity, while the commentators, ignoring the game, are discussing contracts and options, and rank players against their salaries instead of other players. CEO’s piss away loot on stuff they don’t need just to impress their peers, and the quality of art is supposed to depend on what someone else, with more money than you, is willing to pay for it. No one really cares what’s on the front.
Can’t stop it, can’t slow it down, better stand aside. The embodiment of unbridled amoral enterprise, foreshadowed incidentally by art in the eighties, has risen to head of state, and an unhinged bifurcating hysteria stalks the land. If history works at all, it’s about time to take a new grip on reality, to find something positive and good to cling to, perhaps to look around for a signpost that leads out of this swamp. Here we come to an interesting and open question about art -- is art active or passive? Does art reflect or does it inspire, and is it the result, or the cause, of change?
Can an evolving national mood channel itself through working artists in their studios, influencing their work in ways even they might not fully understand? Well, yeah, actually, that does seem possible, and the example cited above just confirms it. Painting may seem an archaic form but there’s more of it all the time, on the sides of buildings, even as an excuse to drink wine, and it’s being seen more often in businesses that are open to the public. Oddly enough, it turns out the time-binding duration of original art has become more significant as the world trends toward one-use disposable, digital volatility. Just the artifact of that much concentrated human effort, and the anguished, perhaps only half-successful attempt to get through to you, has a value of its own, and if you also like the picture, it’s a bonus.
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