Ars Gratia Artis

                        In the elder days of art

                                       Builders wrought with greatest care

                                           Each minute and unseen part

                                           For the Gods are everywhere

                                                          H.W. Longfellow

                                   

How ironic that the greatest clarion-call to a nation of Philistines, was made currency by a former immigrant from a Cossack ridden Ukrainian village whose main stock in trade was the promulgation, dissemination and manipulation of the public trust? Louie B. Mayer’s MGM was the last place you’d ever expect to find art as many a bloodhound and spaniel panting, exhausted could testify their vaunted noses not withstanding, yet these 3 Latin words art for art’s sake are exactly what this world needs to save it from certain destruction.

As a capitalist nation we are being buried under a cascade of useless gewgaw, perpetrated by the availability of easy credit, forged by a system whose illusion of freedom is its bread and butter and predicates its success on molding any theoretical foundation into a malleable product to be bought and sold. This is what modern life has come down to: we are a country of consumed consumers consumed by false needs. God Bless America Tea cozies only $1.99! Capitalism is the ultimate illusion that can transubstantiate at a drop of a hat and re-appear as something we cannot do without as anyone who watches bad TV in high def can bear out. The severity of Man’s denial is commensurate with the size of his cable package!   

Advertising in its nefarious styling creates needs where none has gone before. Miraculously we are willing to pay 4-dollars for a cup of coffee and take pills because we find out our penises might be too small and subjugate our own identities by morphing into a bunch of tertiary stage syphilitic sycophants wiling away the hours wondering what will ever become of Kim and Kanye. We spend every waking moment glued to the comings and goings of the lives of other people instead of living our own. We are transfixed by celebrities gloating ad nauseum about their cribs and wonder why I can’t have a crib like that too. I would like a Lamborghini and a Hummer shining in the Southern California sun. You can, bitch! In 50,000 easy monthly payments. 

And is there a more egregious example of Capitalism’s will to power than the complete embracing of Big Business by organized religion? The Holiest of Holies has become the Hoiest of Hos as religion is packaged like six-packs. The Catholic Church, which once boasted 99% penetration in Latin America, is down to 70-80% in most of these countries. The call from the Vatican is to stanch the flow of Catholic defectors to its biggest competitor Protestantism. Priests who abused children were kept on as fewer men went into the Priesthood and business being business…well you know what I mean. Don’t forget that The Pope is businessman too. Wal-Mart VS Target anyone?

The melding of business 101 and religion cannot be seen more clearly than with the proliferation of Mega-churches. Mega-churches are the latest religious venture to commune with Capitalism. These so called houses of the holy which seat upwards of 20,000 customers are replete with food courts (over 1 million Righteous Burgers sold), church cafes (try a Rapture-cino!) video stores (Own The Passion of the Christ for Eternity!) magazine stands promoting biblical magazines (the Virgin Mary is soooo hot), and apothecaries (try finding a condom there) selling faith based lozenges. If you want to sell more dogma how do you do it? Mega-churches are the equivalent of God Amalgamated and will incorporate any proven business practice that helps them to sell the Word. And what could be better than owning a business that has the world’s most willing investors, investors investing for the ultimate long term and where dividends do not cost the Church a red cent? Taking a page out of the big business playbook organized religion has rejiggered its tenets with the flash and substance of a Liberace concert.

In any culture it is always the established standard that forms the transference that becomes the impetus for public complicity. Communism, socialism, capitalism cannot succeed unless the people buy into it. Without socialization of the masses the new paradigm cannot work. Either the masses revolt or fall under the spell of the prevailing standard. You see this everywhere from ethnic cleansing to the popularity of I-pods, but nothing was more endemic and egregious in its hollowness than the wholesale patriotism exhibited after 9/11. Millions of American flags were bought and fixed to any flat surface that could take the hedge against mortality. Every car, cab, van and sign facia hunkered down behind the mantra of “God Bless America” This anesthetization of the public zeitgeist lasted so long that even the most sub mental new what G_d B_es_ Am_i_ca meant. My local drycleaner used the catastrophe to solidify his customer relations by declaring, “We clean American flags free of charge” “Would you clean them for free if someone brought in 100 flags?” I offered. Many retailers spit shined “God Bless America” positioning it as some cool, simpatico statement by claiming, “Buy here because God does”. That’s sexy! That’s hot! Sheesh! Will God reward us with a hefty bottom line because we believe in Him or are we really just the most virulent hucksters who ever played the game? It is so easy to use Him because it’s the Green Jesus that we really worship. And because the business of America is business WTF?  Lowering the bar is the nature of Capitalism.

Reality shows parlay human suffering to amazing profits. We cannot take our eyes off even the most pitiful sideshow act. So what if Lobster Boy and the Human Blockhead are caught flagrante dilictu in a seedy doublewide trailer. All they are trying to do is share a little down time. What’s wrong with a little love among freaks? I’ve seen the way you do it Mr. And Mrs. Straight America. Ya get my drift? It’s all right with me that Mr. Straight America makes love in a big diaper and bonnet. I could care less unless it’s green-lighted for13 episodes then I’m all over it. You know it’s gonna blow up.

Well now it’s my turn. I’ve got a show that I’m ready to pitch to Fox It’s got all the ingredients, baby! Topicality, salty dialogue. OK, here goes…It’s a sitcom about a typical nuclear family, mother, father, brother and sister, but here’s the catch…the daughter is a stem cell…that’s right a stem cell, cute and perky. Very contemporary. But Mom and Dad are very protective of her for obvious reasons. In the pilot it’s prom night. When the daughter’s prom date shows up wearing a lab coat and holding a clip board…the parents become suspicious, suspicious of his intentions toward their daughter, traditional yet very moderno… Whaddya say? Look Out, That’s My Daughter Thursdays on Fox. Check it out! Heck, if you don’t like that I got something else that’s guaranteed to go through the roof. What do you think about a video game called Virtual Abortion? Safe, legal…it’ll be huge for both sides. We expect to move 50,000 units the first year. This has win/win written all over it.

We are a people that have been reduced to the level of lab rats and are willing accomplices to our own demise. Smart phones rule the day as modern man insulates himself from things that might really matter. Give us our Internet, 500 channel cable, home theater and we will only too happy to bathe in the glow of the sentient, white noise. The only opinions we have are spoon fed to us by corporations. E-mail and cell phones drive us further away from each other and from ourselves. We crave to be entertained 24 hours a day because the thought of being alone with our own thoughts is too much to bear. Would we really need to pay athletes and celebrities millions and millions of dollars just to entertain us if our inner lives did not put us to sleep?

The Capitalist system offers little in a way of spiritual nourishment.. Modern life has created a nation of wage slaves working just to go on a two week vacation, then spending the next year paying for that two week vacation until its time for next year’s two week vacation. Repeat and rinse. The rise of a vociferous evangelical right lends credence to this dissatisfaction. The essence of Capitalism is the capitulation of the status quo. People can’t believe that life in a Capitalist system is really like this. The system creates the need and its citizens refuse to do without mortgaging its future by making minimum payments in perpetuity. Unfortunately the pursuit of material goods is akin to buying the worst product ever made with complete dissatisfaction and no money back. Are we really satisfied to chase the virtual carrot and in turn sealing our own doom in the process? We have managed to sublimate the most important thing about being alive, the actual living of life. By removing the forward movement we have been turned into a species whose sole reason to be is to eat and make garbage. I took a photograph of myself on the toilet eating a Big Mac. I titled the finished print “Cutting Out The Middle Man”.

If life in the United States is all about the Benjamins, where does that leave real art? Art has been relegated to the remainder bin of American endeavors. Opera Houses and symphonies struggle to remain vital as their worth in the eyes of an indifferent society weakens. Funding routinely gets slashed from the National Endowment for the Arts. School curriculums are continually gutted of writing and art programs. How can a society survive when beauty and human dimension is shunted in favor of saving a buck? How does everything except the humanities get mandated as laudable for teaching to our children? Is this why our greatest masterpieces have less distinction than Paris Hilton’s? Art is the unguent that savage men must have. At its highest levels it quells the murderous drive that compensates for being alive in the cosmos. Artists create art on the hope of attaining an apotheosis that art engenders. It is this apotheosis that potentially can bring people together. Art is the ultimate language that binds us all in the pursuit of the cosmic connection as anyone who has ever listened to Ennio Morricone can surely attest to. Great art prompts the calling to life and is as close to the Godhead as we’ll ever get. That is why artists do it. Can the artist explain the unexplainable? No, but it is the highest calling to try.

If mankind would only put down the remote and try to find a way to express itself, and realize that the diminishment one feels for not having the latest this or au courant that is really a call to arms. Instead of allowing a bankrupt system to whittle away what it is to be human, if we would only write a poem, sculpt, dance, or make music instead of picking up a gun, art can be used to push forward and embrace that mystery and make “art for arts sake” the mantra of a new age.

Capitalism has managed to turn a country away from the Jeffersonian age of Enlightenment to the corporate age of unreason. We love our politicians like we like our sitcom characters one-dimensional. We live in a time when well roundedness should be the prime characteristic of any country’s leader, but we seem to only have an affinity for cardboard cut outs. Vaclav Havel was a poet and novelist who as president elevated the Czech Republic to a nation of introspection. The Bush administration because of its Devout Absolutism lowered the arts to the level of a $1.99 tea cozy. Barack Obama is not much better, not because he doesn’t care, of that I am not completely sure, but because no man can escape the meat grinder of American politics of which sausage sells infinitely better than filet.

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