Art.

[hadespussercats]

Thanks, Audley. I look forward to reading it.

I've been writing. At a pretty intense pace, which I haven't done in a while.

I need to go to bed soon. But now that I'm out of that head-space for the night, my mind's all-- well, what else can we get into?

Maybe I'll have a little snack.

[Audley Strange]

Your son is at that age when we first become aware of ourselves as an agent in an environment, but has not yet learned all the rules of that environment, so the real and imagined are not as distinct as self and non-self. It's a great age which lasts a long time in kids comparative to the rest of their development, when cardboard boxes can be forts or fighter jets or tunnels to the magic kitchen, they're not just something that you never have enough of when moving home.

This is something that as adults we blow billions on every year, to lose ourselves in books or films or games or music or dance or sports or drugs, to escape from the mundane, to escape from the poorly defined character roles we collectively label as “I”.

What is halloween if not a ritual tale, its not just an excuse to dress up and be “someone else” any more than it is for those who celebrate mardi gras or the dudes in the robes at stonehenge on the Solstice.

The reason we spend so much time attempting to enter virtual realities is because of one simple fact, we have an acute awareness that the physical world is essentially a ferocious wave of entropy that erodes us from the word go. We are finite. This is also the reason we create such virtual realities, to combat that entropy with novelty, to inspire us not to give up. We are, by creating and enjoying arts attempting to hold back the machine, make “earth as it is in Heaven.” These are artificial paradises to be sure, but then paradise can only be artificial.

So we might see religion as little more than a great art. The mass is a performance and I'd imagine if one was deeply invested in the role as “catholic” if might have some impact in the same way that someone deeply invested in the role as Mambo in voodoo might find themselves being ridden by a Loa during the ritual drumming of their ceremonies. Is this any different from being so immersed in a book or a film that its impact is profound? I think not, I think the only difference is that for some reason we have allowed bad wizards to trick us into thinking religion is “real” magic and “real” magic is trickery and devilry.

They've got the oldest show in town. It's a odd tale, but somehow compelling for so many people for so long, but you know they've been brutal fuckers to the critics, the sunday matinee is not safe for kids and even the performers know its nothing more than a tawdry pantomime. It no longer serves its purposes for anything other than a distraction for the most culturally impoverished and indolent.

And yet our own arts themselves are becoming stale. They're becoming a catalogue of in-jokes, self and meta-referential loops, non-ironic and post-ironic cover versions of everything that's came before deconstructed and laid out in their component parts as if revealing something the audience was too stupid to see or hear the first 10 times, but it's only a revelation as to the contempt with which many artists hold their fans. If not that they are cringeworthy propaganda pieces seemingly from the more adolescent of the artistic minds.

If people are sitting in being entertained by watching the desperate and weak and rich people mocking them then artists have become as useful and relevant as priests. Which is why it is undervalued. It has become something that is mistrusted, is seen as a form of bourgeois intellectual masturbation that doesn't speak to common people. Certainly there is inverse snobbery there too, but that comes from resentment of being left out of the arts and left to waddle through buckets of empty corporate shit that only exists to hold your attention long enough to sell you things.

Art has all the techniques to blow our minds, more so than ever but I fear it's not and it needs to because nothing else is engaging us and without that we might as well just be stupid fucking pandas counting down to extinction. I'm hoping that as the major distribution gangsters are eroded from the market through the internet's ability for everyone to create and enjoy art, we might be entering another renaissance, though that might still turn out just to be astonishingly well produced cat themed parodies of the entirety of the Western Canon.

[hadespussercats]

I'm hoping that as the major distribution gangsters are eroded from the market through the internet's ability for everyone to create and enjoy art, we might be entering another renaissance, though that might still turn out just to be astonishingly well produced cat themed parodies of the entirety of the Western Canon.

It's already happened!!!

Heh.

Well, Audley, your post was worth waiting for. I'd like to respond to it, when I have time to do it justice-- and when kiddo isn't eating random crap off the floor. Perhaps some others will chime in in the meantime?