The War of Art

I have come to the conclusion that “Art” is “War” in the functional sense.

Between “Creation” (libido) and “Consumption” (entropy), there lies the balance of the Self at the centre of the storm.

Great art (of the creative kind), is the facilitator of the Cerebral Orgasm, or little death, which makes way for a resonant new conception of personal being for the insightful beholder. At the micro-personal level, the very best art challenges our perceptions and expands our personal perspective by causing the death of our present Self. Our old values die, even as we welcome the New with a sense of awe and reverence for the creative artists who act as shamanistic emissaries of higher value.

At this same functional level, the art of consumption (as opposed to creation), as made gospel by the barrage of messages in today’s mass media, destroys the individual’s ability to grow beyond their narrow place, especially as they shy away from the small deaths offered by genuine existential challenges, seeking agreeable safety in the “Known”.

When the masses fail to see the beauty of the challenging “conception”, they will generally reject it for more palatable fare manifest in tame entertainments across the spectrum of pop culture. These safer offerings tend to be void of resonant meaning – or the ability to “kill” the consumer (who sits in judgement). Though, speaking of “personal death”, these sponsored “arts” ratify an infinitely more dangerous hubris in the consumer’s own mind which keeps that individual held fast in chains of “normality”. A hubris and petty vanity that keeps us ALL stuck with the kind of malignant consumptive habits that threaten the global ecology, and “Life” as we know it.

In a reductive, constrictive paradigm, we are expected to settle for living vicariously through larger than life “heroes” of our pop culture in a theater of make-believe. We are force-fed two dimensional personalities who ACT out our personal fantasies of faux ‘Creative Destruction’, presented in pornographic displays of obscene wealth and social standing. Sterile pop stars live life in the headlines that too loudly broadcast “MAKING IT”. Yet what have they MADE?… And, woe to anyone who actually attempts to break their personal mold at ground zero, where the vast majority live in abject obscurity. They might well be ostracised and charged with heresy, but more likely, as in the case of Van Gogh or Blake, they will be ignored and left to struggle for recognition in the blind eyes of their contemporaries. The creative will suffer, even as mediocre talents reach the “Stars” (in the sanctioned stratosphere) of a very dull, earth-bound firmament.

Poor art, indeed DEAD art, seeks to preserve the status quo and enforce regimes of ordained acceptability… Freedom of thought and real Creativity is an anathema to a society based on a structure of power. If creative art fights a war that facilitates the ascension of the mind, then consumptive art fights for its descent into the abyss.

Real Art is head sex, as divine War…. A conception of the most immaculate kind.

But alas, “Beauty” is in the eye of the beholder – who ultimately sits in judgement (as God) of their personal microcosm. Though I assert, to accept stagnation of status, and to avoid the “Shock of the New”, is to betray one’s higher potential which ever seeks to rise from imprisonment of the flesh that holds it.