“The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal…they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
Look. Listen. The (western) world is a strange place filled with, in no particular order or scope, the music of Vietnam, broken circuses, moving pictures, heroin substitutes, mistrust, danger, mediums and messages, misbegotten love, gross spiritual malfeasance and manufactured, infatuated titillation. It is a world in which all is revealed and nothing is known. It is a world of codified information. Signs with no signification at all. Knowledge without a cure. Perfectly adjustable, layered, beautiful, endless propaganda, after the cynical. Post-humour. Post-artificial, post-artifice, post-art. A culture with a buried sense of acute failure—shifting footing, or, insecurity without preparation—willing an ethos that is delusional at best. Invention without need. Poison without antidote. Sickness without cure. Culture without art.
Now. I know…The death of art? Nothing, instead of something? –Baudrillard.
But I am artistic. I love art. I know what I’m saying. Art is more important than ever. You say it, but it ain’t so. This is just some weird bullshit that can be countered. With proof, decimated. With anecdotal evidence, dismantled. With the personal, assuaged. With the real, disappeared. I know. A million, a billion, six billion individual experiences—Art and me: We, connected.
Sure we are. But do a million points of light make a city? Do single points make a line? Do the parts make the sum? Can individual mental illnesses cure conformity? Bear with me, I have a point.
In the face of society and aggregate human being, the truly artistic has become an isolated experience, a splinter of icy cool direct observation—of personal value, but only precisely commiserate with the self. Virtuous, sure, but weighed against the amassed purple and gold art, courtesan art, cold thin rail art that imposes itself like a new language, the authentic is globally stomped, intrinsically branded, irrevocably curbed. In a migration from production to reproduction. Birth to facsimile. Facsimile to fascism.
And every day there is a war outside our minds. On the airwaves, via the Internet, and in nearly every image/word/sound/circumstance we encounter. Verbally out manoeuvred, politically excised, socially disenfranchised by new art muscle. The art of smiling suppression. Happy-to-take-your-money art. Happy to be your meaning, never your anti-meaning, art. Art as a state of being. The art of misdirection. The art of irrelevance. The art of belonging. No more unreal, no more contrast, no more definition by opposition, no more artifice. No more sacrifice—only one art, one commodity, one language, one endless design. A career gig—
Deviants and the mentally ill need not apply.
The Beatles – Revolution 9
Posted by Matt
