ART for ART's sake, Money for God's sake!

As Technology quickens the pace of our evolution, Art is similarly evolving at an increasing rate and is constantly re-inventing itself with more relevence to the contemporary Now...

Movies become games, games become movies, movies become comic books, comic books become Animes...

Memes, cliches and truisms develop and thus, thanks to Neuro-plasticity, we continue to fashion ourselves, often with little understanding of the ramifications psychologically to ourselves and collectively as a species...

This is a criticism I lay firmly at the feet of Contemporary Artists, as the line blurs between Entertainment and Art due to commercial influences, without any view to the consequences.

Is there still time for pure entertainment?

Peter Joseph quoted this in the opening to "MOVING FORWARD" ~

"In a decaying Society, ART, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay...and unless it wants to break faith with its social function, ART must show the World as changeable, and help to change it" ~ Ernst Fischer

This again brings up the necessity of a shift in values if we are to have even a remote chance of surviving the coming decades.

We are rapidly running out of time.

The International Energy Agency, a relatively conservative body recently gave the Human Race quite literally a death sentence stating it would all be over by 2035.

What if its True?

Do you still believe there is time for pure entertainment?

Even if that very entertainment contributes to its own inevitable demise by locking its viewers in a trance?

The Party is surely over...the prognosis is not good and the statistics are in.

We are sick and rapidly deteriorating.

Standing still when the Carpet is moving off the edge...when you can see the cliff edge looming up before you is to be part of the problem, and not the solution.

It makes simple entertainment look incredibly decadent, like 'Fiddling while Rome burns', or simply pathological behavior.

Seen from this perspective, our movies and games begin to look somewhat perverse, like porn i.e a form of guilty pleasure.

Our Technology has Transformed ART into sheer Wizardy...a hypnotically seductive spectacle...A shiny, glittering world of pyrotechnic wonders and CGI...

Now, in this present age, now that we can see the horizon looming up so rapidly before us, is the Time to use this Magic of Technology authentically, to utilise these tools to help us all understand the enormous problems we face and the simple collective mind-shift required for their solutions.

There are two forms of ART today, in all fields i.e ART which was produced for MONEY and ART which was produced for ART.

Obviously there has always been patronage, but at what expense?

To the demise of both patron and artist?

To glory and celebrate as the Sun sets on our Industrial Civilization? and on us?

Today ART made for MONEY can be viewed as a product of Cancer, but the latter does not entirely escape criticism either unless it contributes to the solution.

For example if it merely celebrates our dying culture, it too remains simply a vacuous product of a cancerous infestation, to some extent at least, as we are all infected by the same malaise.

Its in the air you breath and all around us....and we are swimming in it...

An Artist's conception

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that seen from the long historical perspective, the short span of Man's rise and fall as a species up to this point, is quite possibly going to be just another tragic echo of annihilation, oft repeated through out the Universe, which thereby makes both forms of ART and their social function, dishonest and illegitimate, unless they clearly stand on the right side of History, and are educating all of us to the problems we face, and even more importantly showing us the Solutions.