gingatao

Blogging As Art.

Whilst I would like to earn a living doing what I enjoy (who wouldn’t?) I have no desire to be personally famous, (which explains the mystery man (haha) act), but I am committed to doing what I can to preserve a tradition, a noble part of human achievement. Art, the idea that is possible to create. And the artist, that there is a subgenre of the human who are artists. (Oh and then duck as the accusations of arrogance and ‘we are all artists creating our own lives’ and yes yes but I am not being metaphysical. I am saying that some people are artists and some aren’t, the same way some people are doctors and some aren’t, some people are prisoners and some aren’t.)

Is there redemption in Art? Does Picasso’s Guernica redeem in someway the suffering that created it? Are the people who died redeemed in it by having their moment recorded in a way that magnifies and articulates so that it is burned into the consciousness of the species? Is Walt Disney the embodiment of evil for turning the deepest roots of memory, folk tales, into advertisements for middleclass American consumerism?

As for the iPod I can understand their desire to have music injected straight into their brains all the time but I suspect this is only so they never have to think. Perhaps every time they think about themselves in the world they get scared or nauseated or depressed or lonely. What kind of a world have we created? Perhaps art is a reclamation of freedom in as much as it asserts that communication is possible. That is certainly what I have tried to achieve here, to make a place in the world where freedom, communication, creation, meaningful art, is at least a possibility. And where people are respected for what they do, what they create.

An artist must be just as motivated to the act of destruction, change and revolution as they are to the notion of creation. Art is not supposed to be passively recording or endlessly describing yourself. It is supposed to be an active force in the world. But until you say, alright, I am going to call myself an artist, I am going to claim that what I am doing is utilising certain learned skills and devices (craft) in creating a work of art, until you do that and risk the constant accusations of arrogance, like Picasso, like Oscar Wilde, like Byron, take an actual risk of complete and utter and humiliating failure, until then the world will remain as it is,