(You pick the title)

I think of the movie adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, where at the end every person has memorized a book and in a way sort of become that book. I remember the scene where there are people reciting tales walking in the forest. Also I am reminded of the first universities, how they were essentially a group of people meeting under a tree where curriculum was transferred directly from person to person. It was a meeting, a powwow. There was a vitality to it, a kind of living energy that flowed directly through human to human communication. There was no plastic medium, no stone to chisel out a figure from or colored powder to smear on a cave wall. You just had person to person illumination. That intrigues me. More than ever, I see that arising and arriving in the art world.

I have said it before, but I will say it again. I believe that a heartfelt tracking of art through 1913 to 2017 has shown that art should no longer be conceived for nor placed in galleries and museums. There is such a behemoth financial and really material web of exhibition spaces built up in the so-called western world anyway that stands as though art could not be any other way. But of course it can. And honestly, if I am writing honestly, it is a very frustrating thing, wait, maybe it is a very awesome thing to publish independently. I envisioned this essay which was really to be very brief, to emerge into the world as an article, self-published through my Linked In profile. I am not really sure what kind of content is even supposed to be on there, however it is so far the only viable means of enacting a piece of writing and getting it into the public sphere that I have been able to at least somewhat authentically connect with. The irony is that, for as much as I do believe that I am an artist, musician and writer as my profile claims the stages and walls upon which my songs are shared and my artwork hung are not always traditional. I hope you see the connection between that struggle and the struggle at large that I feel the art world is facing.

My points of reference as I have said are many but I have two from the past century that I feel stand tall and mark specific transitions in the development of contemporary art which is also very much the development of contemporary thought. At some point art became about ideas as much as it was about a mark or a form. Perhaps it was always about an idea. The two examples I have mentioned are Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Duchamp for his readymade and Cage for his breakthrough that all sound is music. These two points of divergence has splintered infinitely in the best way possible I feel and have brought us to a point, along with the Happenings of 1960 and many, many other movements and efforts, where art is much more now an attitude or at least something that is taken up through an attitude. I have termed this the artistic attitude, using the natural attitude versus the philosophical attitude to situate what it might mean to have an artistic attitude and what it would mean to take it up.  

The ramifications for this are really rather tremendous and completely erases while creating anew in a rather grand and simultaneously minute gesture the landscape of art itself. No more would art be a thing or even an experience cordoned off in a brick and mortar space called a museum or a gallery. Art would be the craft of life itself. What we choose to wear, eat and inhabit would be the stuff of art. Love making, cooking and travel would all be expressions of art because there would no longer be a difference made between art and non-art. Art in this sense, which again is not only something that seems very intuitive but also something that the historical development of art through the ages has shown, is coming to pass as something very much in the vein of personal development and character building more than perhaps anything else. We in a sense are no longer making things or even experiences of things, rather we are making ourselves and each other. We are co-creating our very lives with the manifest destiny of material and existential reality.  

I see this as having tremendous impact on how art becomes enacted in the world. Much of this understanding has arisen in part from conversations that I have had, especially contemplative conversations with my aunt who is a student of human potential in her own right. Once we are summoned to the stage of life itself with an art literally in hand we find that nothing escapes our artistry. Every moment and interaction is a manifestation of the divine and sublime undertaking of mere consciousness itself as it is connected to sensorium and the many and so-called dividedness of all that there is and is not.  

(pause, a bit to eat and drink)

I just realized that stream of consciousness could be the very best way of getting at ideas, new ideas and therefore potentially new ways of living. I really, really like that phrase new ways of living. I love the idea of the reader picking a phrase out of the writing to name a bit of writing. Perhaps some will like the phrase New Ways of Living as such. And I have to say as well that it occurred to me that not worrying about the writing all fitting together perfect is perhaps even more effective. At times I am thinking in so many different directions. But there are connections to be made! There are always connections to be made from wherever you start out and wherever you are going.  

There is a connection that I wanted to draw from the beginning in this writing because I thought it would make for a nice tying up effect. The connection was that one day the idea of a museum could become like it was in Fahrenheit 451 and in antiquity, essentially just a group of people congregating. I am not overtly religious but that sounds very similar to what churches do. Sharing knowledge person to person without books, computers or objects could be the wave of the future. Symposiums would take the place of art fairs. You would have conversations replace the idea of talks give to people. Everything would be shared and interactive content. It would be by nature participatory. And as it has been said the death of the author would already be accounted for in that conversation and knowledge interchange or exchange would be the improvised method for dispersing information, remembered experience and lived experience in real time. It does away with all mediums and brings art back to life itself, to the manifest soul as it were, to the breath, the eye, eye to eye, mouth to ear, heart to heart, presence to presence and so on and so forth. We are the stage. We are the wall. We are the venue. We are the art. To share art is simply to be.