Monday, September 2, 2013

The Holy Ghost of Art vs. The American Political-Economy System (APES); or, Some Thoughts on Labor

One doesn’t perceive art looking for education. One seeks out education to perceive art and experience beauty.
Unless, that is, one’s living in a national security state. Here, the inhumanities of math and science for commercial reward and/or security, a pattern of behavioral psychology favorable to gluttonous automatons, is stressed, resulting in the brutal annihilation of rebellious [not commercial/popular] artistic impulses from the earliest conceivable age.
Trouble is only artists* can perceive when they’re living in a commercial political-economic system geared to the defense of elite assets before it expands into the realm of state as a whole, which is a bit broader than mere government. “Artists,” as Pound famously said, “are the antennae of the race.”
Some artists feel the system as a child under their parents’ rule.
An adult hatred for that subjection is sometimes manifest as a loathing for objectivity, authoritarianism, manipulation, liars, gatekeepers, official responsibility, etc.,  and seems a common “pathology” among many admirable artists…that is, artists whose playing is worthy of admiration in the astute eye of a similarly sensitive beholder.
Point is if you want freedom, become an artist. Be beautiful to yourself and others capable of perceiving that beauty. Be an aesthetic contagion. It’s truer than being moral.
And Gaia will likewise take care of herself…
As Bukowski famously advised: “Don’t try.”
Happy Labor Day sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?
*An artist is one who believes that art—a true pursuit of beauty—is humankind’s highest calling, necessarily replacing morality with aesthetics as the more honest approach to reality, which makes art more moral than morality, artists holier than priests. Homo economicus is beneath contempt and will not otherwise be considered.

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