~ The artist starts with a drive to create. Creativity is an intrinsic compulsion to articulate personal understanding. We want to know who and what we are: without being able to address these important questions, the artist suffers panic and anxiety. Some artists say that their creativity is like a vent for the pressure of being alive and human. Art is the first consequence of human intelligence, of our sensitivity to all things. In this respect, art appears as a spontaneous growth, a response to the world, an outpouring that reflects the nature of reality and our identity. Art is an expression of things we feel and know, elementally, the truth of our inner mind, heart and soul. Art shows us a way to place ourselves in a world that we can understand. But the world all around, partly of our own making, and partly as we happen to discover it, cannot be easily apprehended... The reality of life seems too intangible without the supple imagination of art, which helps us to portray emotions neatly as well as to order the multitude of thoughts we all experience... We have invented art to condition consciousness positively, and to explain everything. We need to create truth so we can become happy.

We use the "idea" to conceive of certainties. Ideas are intended to equate the apprehensions of imagination with the apparent truths nature presents to us. We can liken the action of creativity to remaking the world we already know. The world we already know, however, isn't the world we can say most easily with words alone. That is why we have found so many different ways to express ourselves, with painting and music. Art is a joyful compulsion to reproduce the image of our whole being. Art reveals that human being is infinitely capable and sensitive. We need to satisfy ourselves with joy, soothe our despair and hope for enlightenment. If blessed with an inborn curiosity about life, we tend to transform the innate aesthetic sensitivity into creative action. Poets and dramatists are responsible for developing the reflective element that generate all civilized community. Merchants and warriors have played a smaller role in the history of advancing consciousness. Artists were the first to help liberate humanity from the microcosm of survival, freeing everyone to step into the infinite cosmos of identity, reflection, creativity, judgement and compassion. Nowadays, the scientist has replaced the artist in many respects, but while the work of the scientist has become implicit to our development, only the artist's work remains explicitly conscious, at the front of culture. People have imagined that art and religion saw their origins in one and the same impulsive and essential inspiration! A wish to explain life. All things unknown equal to God. Putting sense in the head. ...Yet today, we merely forget the "divisions of labor and imagination" that artists have provided for modern community.

The artist, while creating the human capacity for reflection and opening the way for civilized progress, never really belongs to his or her community. In murderously modern language, the artist appears to serve no "practical purpose." Of course, this is a nonsensical and misleading distortion. The artist is the collective consciousness (and unconsciousness) of the entire society. His or her knowledge represents everything that we know, including the unpleasant and delicate things many of us need to forget. So, the artist is often mislaid. An artist must fight to win time and freedom to express the understanding civilization needs before it can progress.

Poets, musicians and painters are faced with more avenues than ever before to transmit and diffuse their work. It's a great time for artists. More people than ever before in the history of human civilization are able to make their living from creative work.

Yet, several tendencies are confounding the finest of artists: we see a general tendency towards the uniform commodification of everything that we can produce - including artwork - and for a few basic reasons... [ Note: reasons 1) and 2) below are inextricably complicated by each other, while number 3) is less easily explained by the first two... ]

1) reproducibility

2) need for mass diffusion / selling

3) demand for comprehension / compliance / acceptance

Today, accessing mass diffusion is supposedly equivalent to the reformulation of consciousness as a marketable phenomenon. This sick situation is almost as hilarious as it is chilling to the natural artist. (I do believe that I speak for the artist, too.) We artists can justifiably argue that, right now, imaginative creativity is being swept aside by forms of production that tend to confine mass consciousness to certain limited but "marketable" genres of art.

Concurrent, parallel and sometimes in opposition to the phenomenon of this commodification follows the entrenchment of public and private community support for the arts. Suddenly, the artist finds that he or she must "belong" to a community - or remain left out in the cold. Of course, the wish for a healthful community is wonderful, but only if that community truly wishes after the finest, and not the lowest or most easily diffused kinds of work. Nowadays the artist must become a socialized being: that means - someone who aggressively responds to the current paradigms of creative form and content, as well as someone who seeks to share the same mediums of dissemination; sharing the creative strategy becomes essential for effective communication and the evolution of a community. A socialized being also means someone who is able to get along with a particular in-group's behavioral codes; being accepted or left-out now often depends upon whether or not your actions adequately excite the creative predicates expected by one's new confreres. Public and private support for art tends so to accommodate these subtle codes of socialization, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the essentially personal effort of artistic creativity; in this social way, the modern communal milieu has come to have expressly bullying and distracting effects upon the innate talents of almost all artists. While the author should be at home reading and writing, he or she is obliged to travel about giving readings and lectures. Popularity costs much precious time! Perhaps the truth is more obvious than ever: the born artist needs no more training than he does approval from an impersonal bureaucracy to achieve self-expression and social integration...

(Not surprisingly, we the middle and rich classes, untalented as we may be, often call the tune by consuming crappy work. Not only that, but we tend to despise as much as admire the true artist for being possessed of independent judgement, innate artistic ability and original ideas; consequently, the artist becomes a pariah and earns nothing but disrespect - unless he is willing to knuckle under and participate in one of the various socializing systems, which do little more than duplicate the staid middle class modes of approval prevalent everywhere. Artists know that these modes clip the imagination. Nevertheless, we are forced to exchange originality for "popularity" and other inaccurate measures of creativity. If the rich pretend to admire the successful "let-in" artist, for example, that's only because the artist has won the "right to sell" his or her art in mass quantities. But admiration for the big-seller corresponds to the small and hypocritical parsimony of our modern "value" system; the same people who admire the rich pop-artist will resent everything pure and natural in the artist with integrity - just because he might not be able to sell one thing. But think about how senseless such disrespect is! It is a judgement built on economic evaluations alone! Such false judgements put the artist in a bind and force us, unnecessarily, to question the natural springs of art: pure talent and its inspiration. Why can't we bring ourselves to admire someone who doesn't satisfy the mercantile paradigm? Why? Because we will always be afraid of those deeper things that we do not have and cannot acquire: talent, genius, developed expression and original ideas. Anybody can sell something - but few of us can MAKE something new and original. Few of us are blessed - that's what you think I believe? Well, I still feel somehow damned, even if I can tell Yeats from yeast. I'm just another drudge, lying in front of some pitiful videos and dvds...)

The present situation takes a way of life and reproduces it as a "role." The earlier idea that the individual artist was blessed with an inborn gift is being disregarded and belittled. In its place, we see a community of "trained" or merely "copycat" artists, very successfully integrated into the social-market schema. They are often masters of production and their creativity is channelled into skillfully satisfying the techniques of production. This situation suggests that imagination takes a poor second place to the demands of successful production, and all too often this new criterion forces the artist to limited his or her work to a specific and recognizable style, which is easier to market and sell.

Aesthetic inspiration and contemplation trail behind in the current situation. So, the desert is bought and sold while paradise is laughed at. The true artist, who needs no channel or avenue of diffusion to create his or her work, seems to suffer under the stigmata and frustration - but I hesitate to use the word for fear of being misunderstood - of obsolescence...

For the sake of talk, let's suggest that the artist tends to be displaced, not so much by having to acquire a properly socialized imaginative disposition, but more so - by the apparent obsolescence of certain "timeless" traditional concepts of artistic evaluation and creative action like authenticity, personal imaginative integrity and the educated receptivity of an audience...

Everyone has always argued that the artist is an artist just because of his or her individuality: the world as we know it appears transformed, uniquely, through the mind and heart of a particular artist as he or she knows it... This special juncture between the personal idea and the universal communique defines the very face, heart and nature of pure art, doesn't it? A work of art is always a vision of one mind, and it is the effectiveness of that vision which inspires us to exclaim that the artist's work is perfect. Genius is always defined by originality, completeness, unmistakable meaning and deep insight into human truth. Genius in art, while an individual phenomenon, is readily available to our natural sensitivity for understanding. This is why a simple yet brilliant piece of poetry, like a Blake song, a Catullus bawd or the Dickinson lyric, can rouse intellect and feeling in anyone. Genius communicates a truth that evades and can even chase away the dull platitudes with which we usually endure the conventions of civilized life.

(But you want to interrupt and ask, "Why do we need art after all?" All right, because we want to be civilized beings. Because art permits new ideas to grow. Because we need new ideas if we are to outmode bad habits and the rational propensity to defeat ourselves with the perpetual rigidity of prescribed social and economic behavior, which seldom encourages any alternative way of doing things and often merely serves to help entrench unjust social situations. Art and philosophy gave you freedom. Look at how people and journalists take their freedom of speech and press for granted in America - while in eastern Europe - in a country like Ukraine, the press has suffered under a Draconian species of control enforced by nothing less than an outdated legal coda and a fatuous, perhaps terrified judiciary, which is forced to process suits enacted by powerful interests against individual journalists and their newspapers; in eastern Europe, the victims of power are forced to pay stifling fines. Some have been murdered and nobody is held accountable. The situation is so grim that newspapers in Ukraine refuse to print stories about crime or political corruption! In communist China, or chilly Burma, the newspapers always print the line stressed by the current "government mood," and most editorials are righteous enough to promote the "correct" ideological faith... Let's look for a few examples of communal irresponsibility and injustice that we can experience closer to home. Pollution is caused by our need to buy prosperity. Is that irony, comedy or tragedy? The problem of the human condition must address this question: why do we seem to stop with realizing what our problems are!? We need to go much further and find a way to redeem the world we make from our appetites.)

...The original topic...? A work of genius inspires us with its insight to think and feel our way into a new world that we did not know existed before the poet or painter revealed it to us... Great art work is redolent with thematic integrity and appeals to sense and imagination, immediately and compellingly. The genius, in the act and form of expressing the content of creative work, realizes what is most necessary for receptive individuals to understand... Receptive is the key here. But what makes you receptive? What turns you off?

Art cannot be denied. It shows us the heart of human soul: inner spirit is revealed. So, this is the artist's "job" - to reveal ourselves...

~ We should now contemplate the differences and relationships between inspiration and realization, talent and technique. These codependent types of conscious effort reveal the inner mind manifest in the world around us: the articulations they afford place the artist's soul among claims to knowledge and feelings for beauty. The work of art always abides outside ourselves. Because the world appears external to us, it draws out creative action... The poem is imagined, but is only remembered by the paper upon which it is written. The poem is permanent: the amazing and beautiful thing about art is just this - it's a living thing we can share forever after.

The lateral, associative mind is closely linked with imaginative depth. Creativity is often measured by the degree to which an artist integrates the effort of expression with its effective evocation in the receptor's mind. The audience's imagination must awaken to the new truths that the artist has struggled to express in his or her artwork. Intuitively, talented artists excite interest with easy-coming ideas. In this domain, writers and poets often lead the way because of the precise and immediate communication of specific ideas, feelings and thoughts.

Obviously, fine poets articulate the moods and prevailing ideas characteristic of their time. Skillful painters and sculptors generate an immediate feeling for the human predicament, as well as evoking our most sublime identities; Goya represents the one extreme and Michaelangelo, the other...

Today, painters offer us recourse to a subtler intellect, as we must sort fine abstractions from dross; we retrieve elaborate theories of understanding from the process of perceiving the diffuse and "metamorphic" forms of syncretic art with which painters attempt to transmute reality and express the present situation. Modern painting chooses to ascend from reality, and perhaps to defy presumptions, by appealing to your purest perceptions. Beyond the reflexive tendency to place a recognizable pattern upon the free shapes and colors, it takes time and patience to make yourself available to perceive abstraction... That's one way to articulate the issue. Of course, what we will "see" often depends on what we believe about art before we even glimpse the actual work before our eyes. Despite the many negative prejudices against us, nevertheless, we artists wish to be possessed of intuitive grace, a meteoric subtlety, which signals messages like a ray of light erupting through consciousness like a pure, whole experience. Yet nowadays, many of us have no easy way to process an abstract image, since we are trained "a la pavlov" - according to strictly "realistic" and pragmatic paradigms - which absolutely must not be blocked by unexpected answers to the conventional expectation for only accepting familiar faces and forms... Ah, all that means is we are less curious and receptive than we might be - since we have bought too much hard and fast certainty, identity, and insist on expanding upon our bad case of megaallionimmaniappsiposdrompsytatis - we can all chew up five millions of syllables to prove we know what's right... (But are they buying it, Sally?) ...Maybe not exactly, we remind ourselves now and again - as your good pal doubt arrives upon a light tread, a tickle: After anger should follow laughter at yourself - unless you're a killer or mean enough to be too hasty in your judgements. So. Contrition, for the lucky. Those whose disposition banishes fear tend to feel happy about the human destiny... We lead optimism to believe we can do it, so we do it... It is good for us: to discover that there are more uplifting viewpoints available to the emotions behind our need to intepret things as we expect them to be... Yet always, other minds are silent to yours. You must travel far beyond the confines of a seed before you see the flower in your life. Others have their own anguish and special elations, too. Can you feel other people's emotions as your own? To speak, to reach for the loving touch... Your tender heart has only the mind and other people upon which to rely. Chasing after spirit still wishes for certainty and absolute knowledge... We all know that the expansion of industry need not lead to absolutism... Let's trust that we are smart enough... but I can wait till the day after tomorrow before you rip off my balls, sir. Get on it now: most people living in the developed world have many more chances to access data and knowledge from a greater number of sources than ever before... We can search with care and intellectual discrimination to satisfy the quest for truth. Your understanding is only limited by its lack, and so, should excel upon its wish for new knowledge... (There is still some lingering incuriousness: inspired by the collective propagation of shared desires, mostly for the sake of "security," instilled in all of us and reinforced by habitual behavior, market creeds, government, culture cops and cons, what have you, and the inevitable belonging to some identifiable people...) Yet, notice how the finest artist wishes to remove all the preconceptions imbedded inside. The artist inspires us to think and talk about the world around us... We need to replace preconceptions with perceptions and thoughts. This is perhaps difficult for most of us to understand... But perhaps we can only see something as it is if we stop asking what it is - and look...

In recent times we've seen another inevitable trend that defies the truth-quest of all art, and it has sprung a new hybrid life-form: marketable, or, "commercial" art... Curiously, to adjudicate or finalize an impression of quality, wholeness and harmony in such contemporary art forms, the decision often depends on the artist's apparent finesse - his or her mastery of creative techniques and modes of reproduction. Are the lines clean and the whole work sealed in itself - properly smooth - just like a completely seamless package? Yes, that's what is wanted in the office today! Even newspaper art critics, though paid not to, laugh at heaps of sand piled up in the corner of the gallery. But nowadays, most art critics are so lost that they will usually rave about anything that appears smartly done, expertly executed - finely polished. This cautious sensibility is a curious statement about the expectations we put upon our perception of formal entities; even minute imperfections in the unity of the whole are not tolerated. If there are any obvious faults, then the artist's only defense is to claim a "concept" or a "conviction" that can excuse the weaknesses as "intentional, human, comic" and representative of the semiotic ideal - or the syncretic node of orgasm squirting through the psy-wave of cosmic truth, brother. What have we? The precise and the finished idea is loved very much today; meanwhile - incomplete, non-conceptual, unstylized and disunified themes are scanted as amateurish... Yet everyone knows that uniform vinyl wallpaper grosses more income than wild abstraction...

Abstract art and most expressive forms of art appeal to the contemporary sensibility because, with the advent of modern "human omniscience," people have also come to worship the synthetic ability of the human imagination. We succeed whenever we inform art work with new unities and novelty draws upon sources that were previously disparate. A good way to explain the wondrous sanctity of this human-godhead-made-of-synthesis is the imaginative process inspired in us as we understand a metaphor. We see how much the inspiration of ideas and emotions depends upon associations! Abstract art is often an interior effort: it represents the imagination in its most pure expression - and shows creative imagination meeting with the external world. Abstract art inspires a metonymy for pure imagination that springs up as something very real: the art object is possessed of a raw actuality that symbolizes the meeting of imagination and perception within reality - yet a special reality: the humanly creative objective. The metaphoric power of the plastic arts is unlimited, because there are no rules to follow, only sublime ideas, forms, shapes and colors to achieve. The modern time has liberated all sorts of new content in a wide variety of fabulous forms: in the world of music we see the principle of spontaneous creativity come to the fore most especially during this century - with the effusive invention of jazz.

The only question nobody has been able to answer very well is this one: exactly what stimulated us to achieve such an astonishing capacity for artistic invention? Did the egg come before the frying pan? In effect: was the liberation of intimate relations and the breaking down of class strata into familiar see-through refrains - was that more likely an impetus for new art forms than the discoveries we made with science and the consequences of applied technology? The answer isn't forthcoming, unless perhaps we abandon the compulsion to demand a cause and effect scenario. New tools may have opened us to express the imaginative freedoms already given to us by an advanced scientific era; also the era gave us a sudden, new sensation of paradox - that technology was actually going to be an imprisoning liberation, and which conditions us to depend on it, occupied as we are with living and working, members of a specific class, inside the factory...

I don't care if you think I don't know what I am talking about. The point is: I am free to write whatever I like! I'm smooth, and a big mouth is my only blemish.