Doesn’t art stand at the pinnacle of civilization because it has no utility? Some may try to defend its value by asserting the benefits of art to the individual, society or the economy but are they missing the point or trying to placate those who have no time, patience or money for the impractical? Isn’t art cheapened when it is functional, when it plays to the audience? Do we want to be flattered with a poorly hidden cliché or be presented with the cleverness of the artist? Is it art because an ego made it or because we are told it is? Great art, in whatever activity or medium you choose to call art, speaks again and again as life progresses because it leaves for you to finish that which you will only find outside it, in life. It asks us to sense what the artist saw in a moment of insight, in awareness. Great art asks to be abandoned; perhaps it is not trying to say anything at all. Must all art await the stamp of critical acceptance, popularity or fashion? Why would anyone pay millions to possess what will never be theirs so cheaply? By what art did they accumulate the wealth to wear another person’s talent and hope to know, by association with it, the poverty that made it? Look at the institutions that lay claim to those priceless thoughts.
Will you ever find things called truth, meaning or reality in any institution? Will you ever find such things in pages like these? You will find many truths, meanings and realities? You can find new them in any culture and in the people around you. They give you a feeling of substance and continuity but what does this reality consist of? Have you noticed the changing quality of it in various circumstances, how its timbre shifts with your mood? Have you noticed how you excite and suppress that reality and how all your activities, how all you ‘know’ shapes how you think and feel and consequently what you see?
Looking at life with a little learning it is easier to find what complies with your assumptions and quickly or even unconsciously discard or overlook almost everything else.
