Humanity of Art

I’m on vacation this weekend looking at what to do. I guess there is a feeling of just wanting to be more than doing anything. I have it in mind though to try and get my music and sound work up on Spotify, streaming. I feel like as the days go by with my blog posting I become a writer more and more. That over the years now writing is piling up. I want to write more books but just as much I want to be delivering my ideas in as contemporary a manner as I can. For that it seems like podcasts, YouTube and Instagram are the best for that. I see how Yuval Noah Harari spent 6 years on his book Sapiens. Then my mentor Brainard Carey suggested it and since then I have read all 3 of his books (Harari’s) and gone deeper with my art as the craft of life theme.

Brainard is brilliant and there is a part of me that want s to move to Brooklyn and well but really no I just want to go deeper with the art that I have established for myself here. What I would really like to do is get in touch with more people from throughout the world via email or Skype and meet people that way because I live in a small town and have a calling myself to somehow make a significant contribution to the culture of my times. I have been waiting to spell that out for myself for a long time. Essentially it is very similar to what Marcel Duchamp did with his readymades. All of art changed. I see Duchamp, Warhol, Cage and a few others as being extraordinarily important. Where sound itself became music. Where every “thing” could be art. Where fame gets transcended with Warhol a la social media. These are the types of things I am thinking about and acting on these days.

As much as I grew up wanting to be alongside my heroes in art museums and through record sales I see now that to be like my heroes I have to be unlike my heroes because they were trailblazers and pioneers and so I have to do something different from them to be like them in a paradoxical way. For me this notion of art as the craft of life is just that a completely revolutionary way to do art for now and the coming future. It is like what Ashley Turner does for Yoga only I am doing it for contemporary art, meaning crafting our lives and even potentially our being. It is a way of doing art that grows out of what has so far been a lifetime of studying the artists who have come before me and having long meaningful conversations with among other people my aunt who sees everything as everything.

There is an unmanifested realm beyond any category that I think is available to us all at any time. It is just that for me, art has always been the way in which I understand the world. I think in some ways that I could grow beyond art as did Duchamp and Acconci. But at the same time I still paint from time to time and do a conceptual piece here or there. The truth though is that I think there is immense power in looking at yourself and your life as art and doing work with that. Reading and meditation are the two main ways in which I practice this kind of understanding. And the two statements that currently seem to sum up the goal or point is ENHANCING THE QUALITY OF LIFE (one’s own and in general) and also DEVELOPING UNDERSTANDING (one’s own and in the collective).

I do this blog and my Instagram and my YouTube videos and my meditations that I have begun to create and it is all about sharing the beautiful power of life to be an edifying journey of self discovery and love above all love. I am just one person in a small town but I know, absolutely know in my heart that I have connected with the spirit of the art world, truly. Through travel, study, conversation, practice and so much more and that what is coming out of a deep deep and profound love for the calling of art is to help art transform us, to let go of ego to be the change you want to be and see in the world. I will keep communicating through these channels because I know that the message is important, so important that as Angie Haze a local musician says, we are enough and how Eckart Tolle says you are not your life situation. There is something beyond all that. And you can tap into it at any time, especially through a meditation practice. As Harari says (and I am paraphrasing and continuing with interpretation of my own here), to know yourself objectively, to just focus in and explore the reality of your breathing, one cultivates the ability to see the whole more clearly as well to be able to tap into what is happening globally and understand! To connect and be able to take good action towards what it is we can be as a people and as a global community.

So many things that we face in the world right now in 2019, climate change, as Harari says, technological disruption, nuclear concerns, artificial intelligence. So many things. And I think, not only believe and feel, but think that we could learn to address these things as individual and as people when we come more fully to what it means to be human. In that way then art transcends itself. Everything does become everything and we are free to be individuals. To find community with all of humanity. Compassion and empathy as Amanda Palmer says. DNA editing comes to mind as another situation that we can learn to craft responsibly.

I need to learn more about the DNA editing but it is just a start to be aware of what is going on. We can really learn about life itself. And as art can be the craft of life so any conventional artist can learn to take care more and more deeply of themselves along the way while people who never thought of themselves as conventional artist may begin to paint and draw and all of that. There is a place where the world and art, the art world and the life world so to speak, just the world itself become one. Laura of Platasso talks about that. This is a coming of age story for humanity. Galleries and museums are not that far off from the caves of long ago. painted imagery on a wall in an enclosed space. That is wonderful and important but there is so much more and life is calling out that we come to understand what the next few chapters of the story of humanity will be.