WHAT IS ART?

There is no moral balance between the .01%’s rights to acquire huge wealth and the suffering of billions of others, which their wealth and rule create.

Having witnessed people beaten, having looked into the eyes of suffering children, having seen poverty and depravation at close hand, having grasped people go without medical attention, without work, pleasure, beauty or education, none of the rules of capitalism, as currently practiced, make sense to me.

In a world that makes sense, all acts that create the above consequences would be, by law, illegal, and would be punishable. In a world that did make sense to the 90% such a moral position would not be a question.

I am certain that if aliens from another planet looked at what we allow a tiny handful of people to do to the rest of us, they would judge the rich as criminally insane and the rest of us as fools.

Having said that, and constantly being in opposition, I don’t want to be ‘anti’ this or post ‘Post’ that, but rather for something – and that is for The Complete Freedom Of Truth. This means that with out complete freedom there cannot be truth, and without complete truth, there cannot be?freedom. (From a speech given by the poet and playwright Vaclav Havel, Belgrade, Serbia)

Sometimes merely showing a truth is a powerful intervention that helps people recognise, though?art, that they are not alone. Artists may help people understand that they and others suffer at the hands of our political representatives, those who have decided to serve mammon rather than the people, or that they suffer from the heartlessness of the insurance companies, the medical industry or the legal system’s bureaucracies, or from an economic system that literally enslaves one to educational debts, low wages, hidden high taxes, dreamless immoral occupations, and to a cultural hollowing out their souls.

What is this thing we call culture? It is anything thought or produced by human beings, as for instance agri–culture, or developments in science transformed into technology and then used in production or destruction; it is the knowledge and work of a plumber as well as of an artist.

But art is a particular part of culture: it is neither technology nor craft although it employs both. For an object, text or performance to be ‘art’, it needs to clearly describe our collective and individual reality in a creative way. Or is that a description found in a good piece of journalism?

Does this ‘piece’ need to offer hope to be considered art? Does it need to offer a voice for the voiceless for it to be art? Is it sufficient to give form to the previously unknown, unstated or suppressed?

This leads me to ask, must it embody beauty of form to be art, or can the form be random, unaccountable, disconnected from content?

How can a concerned human being who cares about freedom, justice and fairness, produce art that speaks to other human beings? How can that person become an artist committed to creating a better world?

That person must develop skills and craftsmanship; and must learn the history of the medium so as not to attempt to reinvent the wheel, but to build on the creativity proceeding that moment, and must come to understand what art is that serves the victims of history and what art is that serves those who rule that history.??

The artist must come to discover the differences between serving mammon and serving truth. In so doing, the artist will discover the difference between art and propaganda; between oppression and freedom, between works that address people’s needs and decoration or entertainment which reinforces the ideas of the status quo.

But there is an additional and vital element. For art to be meaningful art, and not craft, decoration or superficial entertainment (always leading to the values of the establishment), it must embody beauty. Beauty, as I have written previously, is the consequence of pleasing form united with truthful, relevant content that addresses the viewer’s needs. At the point of encounter between individuals and the art, if individuals see/hear/ read the piece and find it opens them to broader views about society or greater depths about being human, than there will be the sensation that beauty brings: a rush of emotions and revelations, a sense that life has just been altered for the better. Art is central to who we are because it is one of the very few ways we can have a dialogue with out souls and to discover relevant truths, without ministers, the education system, politicians or the popular media in the way.