Blog Doubt - Forget Duchamp -Sephiroths - ( Austrian Art Magazine 2017)

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Thinking my blog should become more critical or become more focused on art criticism . Then I step back and think that's just more work

more confusion.The political situation seems very fraught with anxiety and fear. But haven't we been here before? Doesn't the perpetual war

in this world grind on and on.

Has politics become part of the entertainment industry? And art sweet art something very few can make a living from though

it's allegedly the fruit of our culture . The eternal return the sense and perhaps reality that we live in a circle rather than in a line, that time is

a bit more than our biological reality. That our time is always running, you can not stop except to sleep. And in sleep our dreams are often

dreadful tales of woe. Criticism abounds. Everyone has an opinion, opinions are shared and embroidered into the fabric of our identities.

Blogs are like dreams in the sense that no one is quite sure what they are content wise or as writing. I have doubts all my life I have had

doubts about this existence we live. And while I'm pleased I have a means to complain I'm not certan my complaining is useful or my doubts.

In our consciousness we push our death our vanishing deep into the background. We don't think of ourselves as being temporary. Our doubt

about a deity is a given, some evidence of a spiritual being is apparent in all the detritus of past worship. At the very least the desire for some

dimension beyond this one persists as a sort of posthumous desire to be remembered and brought to mind.

 But we forget. We forget as one layer covers another as one object hides another. Things are lost ideas vanish and return. Art sweet art which 

is common and rare both surrounds us in myriad forms. We preserve our art after a fashion, we preserve all sorts of cultural products . The

world has museums aplenty. Indeed museums are the place we find art and history and often our own destinies.

 But I have my doubts about this thing too. This house of the muses wherein we find our inspiration our solace our dream of worlds before

and worlds to come. But impediments prevent our doubts from being answered. What of all the conflict that exists in this world? From what

point in time will peace ensue? And has their ever really been peace? Or is our world just a battlefield and these cultural products mere 

relics of these struggles? 

 The Vietnam war was a great shadow that we lived beneath for 15 years most of my younger days were spent in this shadow. It was the

background music of my education . It formed my personal politics. The USA was built by slaves and our wars were fought by the poor and 

we could not stop the wars. The wars fueled our economy and our politics of anxiety and fear of other different views, difference was the

enemy. And the cultural products were made often despite these impediments with little or no support from the world. War and art have

been partners since before history  Children drawing war planes with different logos of competing regimes , Nazi vs Commies.(ISIS,Taliban vs.  USA,Brits. We can fix the world but it requires perpetual war and bigger museums to contain the relics the cultural products produced by the conflicted world.

So art is valued highly but the artist is an outlier, a sad maker, an art worker without a patron. The church and state required advertising (art)

more than some trace of human feeling and love. The doubt for me is whether the whole enterprise is conflicted by our temporary nature

we come into the world and we leave the world and the world seemingly never knows we are here . And as the poet wrote - What are poets for

in destitute times?  My answer is all times are destitute and the war is never over. And art is an innocent expression of our desire for peace 

and freedom from all the conflict all the sorrow that this world has contained since it began. Art is the love of freedom and it's only in the great

shadow that we can sense our urgent desire to draw on the wall before the shadow consumes us all.

Note - Holderlin and Oscar Wilde's shadow