“Ultimately, the role of art is to wake us up. Routine takes the place of life so easily. The senses resign, numbness enters. Our job as artists is to sharpen our perceptual mechanism on a daily basis in order to venture out into the world with the curiosity to receive, perceive and report back. And yet the present culture and overabundance has dulled our perceptual mechanisms enormously. Because of out responsibility to depth-dive and then surface with fresh visions about the human situation, it is critical to find innovative and effective ways to develop observation and discernment.
The US is, at present, culturally starved. Almost everything produced by the commercial arena insults out intelligence: reality TV, fast food and books written for dummies; these are all an overwhelming insult of out perceptual facility. Art, news and entertainment largely reflect the surface rather that what is inside; form rules over content. We tent to judge things by the outside, by what something looks like. We think that we know all about a think because we know what it looks like. In fact we know very little. We have not explored the depths.
...”
It goes on and on and gets better, the best, the bestest!
The question I was posing the other day reflects the situation I find myself in - an artist facing the audience used to Big Brother, PlayStation3, Game Box, X Box and all the other boxes, not to mention Cable TV, facebook and McDonalds that is at least 2 times less expensive that a cheap restaurant anywhere in the world?
And what happens when an art students span of attention and interest equals that of a 15 year old boy who just saw breasts for the first time?!
Will art stay standing (?) - for it seams that since ancient Greece we have been going downhill considering that Euripides staged a play, all of Athens showed up and saw it before they voted on the subject of refugees, in this particular case.
Have no time to finish what I started, at this point.
I leave myself with a question: Since I am obviously not gonna give up on the hope for utopian artists life - how do I get there? In the context of TODAY?
