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The reality we inhabit is as deep as anyone cares to go. There’s always more to see, and all that’s required is to look, but even so, the world we all inhabit has been getting shallower, until it’s mostly just surface. Maybe you haven’t noticed. Advertising cultivates lowest denominators, and that’s fine with the overlords, since the mass of human flesh concerned about what brand of beer to drink, or what sports franchise to root for, is so much easier to herd and exploit. Those dead-eyed zombies cashing in on war and famine have an ongoing beef with art, and a raging dislike for artists, mostly because they wake people up, arousing their sense of self and causing them to question their place in the world.
In totalitarian countries, they pump out their single-world view, manipulating the masses and dulling their aspirations. These terror states just throw independent artists in jail, or worse. Any art that doesn’t promote their program of control is labeled degenerate and making it becomes a crime, fairly simple, but in open-market societies the approach has been more nuanced. The state, under the guise of progressivism, devotes massive amounts of public money to promoting an art no one really cares for, until serious people begin to lose interest. As though on a sacred mission, they inundate galleries and museums with the non-objective and self-referential, a style turned out in great quantities by the salaried wing of their vast art bureaucracy. Either way the goal is similar -- reducing their fellow humans to a drone population intoxicated on festivals, parades, and sporting events, never asking where they’re headed, or who’s in charge.
Societies, at large, are just going to have to work this out. Will the essential human spirit emerge from the ashes of the twentieth century, and wizened by all the cheap lies, finally assert itself against the dumb narcotic miasma they’ve cast over the land, with sitcoms, cop shows, seven layer lotteries and overlapping rounds of season-long tournaments. It looks like a long-shot from here, but we have to live our own lives in the meantime, right? Maybe we should ask, each as individuals, what is it about visual art that has it censored and controlled in one society, and reduced to a poker chip by another? What are they afraid of, and could it be somewhere hiding in plain sight?
Millionaires have attempted to turn art into a signifier of elitist sensibility, the market begets a branded commodity, there’s even a form of state-sponsored secular idolatry, and it would be best for the serious person to see through all of that. On the walls of caves, millennia before the dawn of history, people made marks in charcoal and ochre, and with our pampered modern eyes we see long-extinct animals as they were. Have you been taking that for granted? It’s an amazing human attribute, and it’s the crux of what they’re concerned about, pardon me boys, those mollusks in the star chamber, high above us.
Visual art enters the nervous system through a service door, at a level not accessible to intellectual thought, and responding to it is experienced more as a kind of knowing, or even better, can sometimes seem like remembering something long forgotten. If the beguiling image is only attempting to sell you a product, it’s empty promise can seem stale, no matter how talented the artist. On the other hand, an original piece of art, even if the product of only sincere and honest effort, already embodies an example of an aspiration that goes beyond a desire for money, since it’s an arduous apprenticeship, and the nervous system knows it. I may not share a meal, but I’d sit and watch the sunset with a cave-person anytime. We’d compare portfolios.
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