The Terms and Conditions of Art

If your art exhibit is an homage to the oppression olympics curated by Tate Modern, we’re not coming.

Let’s be honest: most artists with a thriving social media presence are either selling some kind of watered-down, reductive, digitized bullshit that only Wonderbread afficionados could appreciate or a weekend “masterclass” regurgitating The Artist’s Way, with finger paints and breathwork.  I find it oddly arresting that most who teach how to access creativity have yet to produce anything creatively worthwhile.

From the depths of my Instagram death spiral, a screeching parrot of a man hawking his weekend workshop balks at the camera, “Art must be rooted in sustainability, in community and inclusion, in higher consciousness, in creating a new cultural myth!”

What a bunch of bullshit. Since when has art given a flying fuck about any of that?

Most artists that attain the echelon of greatness are introspective loners, obsessed with revealing the mystical truths of existence through the exercise of their own capabilities, and that is what results in the attainment of any real sustenance and occasionally, in a community growing around them. But most notably, it is this furious pursuit of honesty, culminating in the attainment of higher consciousness, that reveals the truth of their Beingness and of the Great Creative working through them—and only the embodiment of that truth is capable of writing the new cultural myth. 

It is the logic of the humanitarian dilettante to assume that prolifics like Basquiat, Prince, Wilde, Coltrane, Dilla, Saint Laurent, Pacino, Hunter Thompson, Freddie Mercury—though steeped in the roils of a culture churning against them at times—were at all concerned with proving a point to that culture (and saving humanity) whilst in the flow state. Only those to whom art is an intimacy know that you cannot prostrate before the unmanifest, asking to be moved by the Creative, while at the same time bearing the weight of a tangled up wad of narratives that society has thrust upon you. You cannot. Art does not work that way.

The infamous silent scream: a lesson in artistry. Forget yourself and be moved.

In case you missed the fine print, to the charlatans defining modernity, the creation of a new cultural myth means pledging allegiance to the current politically-acceptable thought-cults and initiating all creative endeavors from the consciousness of adhering to and proliferating the dogmas of said thought-cults. Hence, our collective throbbing wad.

It is utterly laughable to suggest that any kind of innovative energy can be tapped while circumnavigating the mental frameworks of ending legacy systems, colonialism, political chaos, economic inequality, and mitigating the atrophy of human connection in the modern world and the collapse of society. Art does not begin from an agenda. It stands in defiance of all agendas, even those held by the artist toward a singular piece of work! That the creation of an inclusionary safe space and a new cultural myth is the goal of art to begin with is a thought that only exists in the minds of those selling the idea of creativity. It would never come from those channeling the fruits of it. Great art is dangerous. It is an iconoclastic convergence of what has been gifted to us and what has been ripped from us and exclusivity—of or belonging to only one—is what gives rise to this attainment well past the mental box of concepts our culture seems intent on shoving down our throats.

Given enough perspective, one can empathize with the revolutionary impetus encoded into battle cries like art must save the world!, yet the fundamental incitation of this statement is artless naivety. This call to action is initiated by a consciousness trapped at the midpoint between ignorance of the self and annihilation of the self—the half-baked awakening of the pseudo-pedant. It is a sentiment borne of the frustration that comes from seeing how things could be better but not yet living as that something better. Art doesn’t have the need to rewrite narratives and reinvent systems because real art cannot exist within those narratives and systems, and it never has. Only to a consciousness trapped within narratives and systems does the need arise to escape them. This is the chatter of the dilettante. Creativity in and of itself is the escape into which we surrender in order to transcend the worldly. In other words, real art is too busy being born to plan its own revolution. 

I bring up this depressing mental land grab because its a public health hazard. Hidden within its humanitarian plea is the insidious requisition that you hurry up and know yourself so you can hurry up and define yourself so you can generate something relevant to that definition and make a meaningful contribution. First of all, no one wants to eat the unripened fruit. Ninety-five percent of what passes for art today is filler for the content treadmill. It’s boring, derivative, and it lacks the gravitas of anything produced by those still flaunting a fully functional attention span. Secondly, you as an artist must reign in the desperate need to exist in the minds of the audience as a politically-correct paper-doll cut-out character, trimmed just so as to not injure anyone with a rogue jagged-edge. You have to give yourself permission to be totally misunderstood—hated even!—if that’s what results from the flow of creativity moving through you. That means breaking up with your concepts in an era that demands you be defined by them. But if the goal is to produce true and lasting work, then you must come to terms with the fact that great art transcends the artist! You have to disappear to yourself and make space for God to speak through you because at least that’s honest. And the only cultural myth that can be written, the only one worth being a part of quite frankly, is the one that points toward the truth of existence, and that can only be penned by those who have so entirely eradicated from their consciousness the need to participate in a lie.

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