Just a note, this morning, to let you know that The Huffington Post published my first entry on that site yesterday. As we used to say in English English, I’m all chuffed about it. I hope that my blogging friends will check me out here, and that you’ll consider giving me a boost by commenting, or even by checking in as a “fan.” I could use the help.
It's my intention to contribute at least once a week on Huffington. My hope is that these entries will attract more readers to “The Buddha Diaires” and, in turn, to this circle of bloggers I now think of as my friends. If Huffington readers link from The Post to “The Buddha Diaries,” they will find links there to all my friends and neighbors in the bloggerhood.
Aside from which—and more importantly: May we all find true happiness and the source of happiness! Blessings all around.
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4 comments:
peter, you rock star, you.
Jen, thanks for the first laugh of the day!
Art seen five hundred years from November, 2007, you ask?
Contemporary art will be viewed seriously, because people invested so much in it and spent comparatively so much for it. It will be viewed with an eye for how we struggled and coped with questions of the day and questions of all-time, man''s place in his universe. They will be looking for clues of progress and regression. They will see that artists struggled with over-population in times of sagging responsibilities and that most famous artists joined the fray rather than offered anything better. They will dismiss this as human, because most artists came from lowly places and sought to better their own lives, just as earlier artisans worked for their bosses, decorating cathedrals, monuments, and domiciles to their glories and fantasies. They will carefully note that no special artists led the pack the way Picasso or Dali did. They will note that Art, with a capital a, was, for the most part, not posing the greatest question facing mankind, whether nature shall govern the world by its own laws, or whether priests, kings, and the wealthy shall rule it by fictitious miracles and money.
But, they will see a marked rise in diversity and mixing of styles. They will see a pre-occupation with, and relish for pluralism and the new. In this, they will see something new, that the exponential rise in population, with its accompanying chaotic shift in wealth and politics translated into many aspects of life being considered art, which by contrast, were not seen as art in earlier times, at least, not by so many. They will notice a multitude of new definitions of art, mostly relaxed definitions, to encompass more and more people. They will correctly identify this in the rise of the 'art of living', the "art" of this and that for the masses and the nearly total, merging of 'art and entertainment', to replace the arts of spititual consequence and philosophy. They will notice a trendy pseudo-spiritual. In short, they will notice the transition of art into an industry, an industry of pseudo-art. They will see the rise of crafts, design, and commercial art to the level of high art, even communication, and correctly see this in connection to economics and the middle class, replete with bourgeois ideals. They will note, first the discrediting of museum institutions, then the re-institution of museums as places of mass consumption, profit, and the status quo of mass taste and decorum. They will note the flourishing of the gallery system as experimental spaces with the accompanying expansion of profit and fame. And they will note the heightened level of idolatry based solely on notoriety in a greater number of artists after Picasso. But curiously, none in a vast array dominated the scene quite the same way.
They will see classicism and renaissance borrowed, side by side, baroque mess and minimalism in point/counterpoint. They will see a myriad of expressions and a myriad of doctrines in mixture grappling with change. They will see the fall-back to well-tested modes in a mix, the validation of borrowing, legitimized as "sampling", repetition based on repetition. They will see that these people did not fully comprehend the changes facing them, but were trying to do so. They will note, the questioning and debasing of reality rather than the mere suspension of it or the paradox of irony. They will see uncertainty. And to, they will note the acceptance of diversity in an explosion of population in the artist class, especially as activists attempting to influence others, brought on mainly because of the total collapse of, yet clinging to, religions and the fearful struggle for survival as a buffer to the effects of over-population. They will notice the blurring of lines between art and secular propaganda and the sharp rise of violent subject matter. They will see how a world which quickly shrunk affected art. They will see that artists struggled to accept and preached diversity while clinging to their cultural identities. They will see that, most artists were wrapped in the personal beauty of their own ideals, rather than seeking the ideal of universal beauty, that the Greeks and the Renaissance were still the gold standards of. They will see that, in the myriad of things, they were sorting out what had been learned up to that point, a time when all ideas man will ever know, were known, but not fully understood nor fully implemented, and certainly not reflected in art very well. They will see artists who struggled with how to reconcile so much knowledge, but lagged behind it woefully. They will see very little success in this by so many who attempted to adapt the rise of science and technology to artistic principles, by creating rational art pure of concept. They will see an attempt to distill new essences of reality based on old ideas and remake reality in surreal constructs. In all this the human being was implied but not represented. This will bolster the effects of disillusionment until the turn of the century when man again became the focus of art, flimsy man, however, tied then to the current, while trying to flee it.
They will note how 2007 regurgitated the current and rejected the past, but couldn't escape either. They will note the near-total pervasion of photography in art, the image produced by a box and patterns of dots, the freezing of reality through an impersonal piece of glass and the machine-made image. They will note the rise of artist as machine. And yet, they will see the pre-occupation with illusion, fantasies, more than anything else, and that in this, artists were securely cemented to man's own demise, since man had been struggling to escape dreary reality from his primitive existence, through the Dark Ages, and finally through the self-destructive modes of destroying the planet and himself as part of something he became out of sync with. They will see this attempted escape as more connected to the past than as visions or hope for the future. They will see the precedence of escape to new worlds off earth. They will see art that predominately reflected disillusionment on a grand scale in a mixture of well-worn ideas, distortion, and manufactured reality. They will note the dawn of technological mediums, but which mimicked earlier ones on the whole, though the seeds of the future were planted. They will see the beginning of the merging of fantasy and escape in real-time, first in moving pictures, then in the dawn of virtual reality, as the ultimate experience in art and the playing out of man's disconnection, his pseudo-connection to his surroundings and himself.
They will note a persistence in the hand-made object in a losing battle with the manufactured and production techniques which lured away "the audience" in sensational ways. They will note the progressive shift of capital for art to powerful cartels of taste. They will notice the totalitarian trends in style, delivery, and content, the near lack of disruptive artists except as trendsetters. They will note the continued reservation of truly great art, art of vision and hope, for a progressively smaller group of connoisseurs. They will note the continued and persistent destruction of reality in favor of the new - well into the next century, until the dawn of man which catches up to the intelligence he accumulated and finally began using toward good instead of confusion and ill-gotten gain. Yea, right!
Peter, I have just had the time to catch up on your account of your NY visit. Thanks so much for your review of ROCK & ROLL and the current gallery scene. Congrats again on Huffblog.
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