What if art is not at all not about individual self-expression? What if was art is not a cultural commodity? What if art is not particularly about entertainment ? What if art has nothing to do with decoration? What if art is not essentially aesthetic or esoteric?What then would you call this pretentious overused word art?

And what would you call the Art-tiste? A tormented sensitive soul? Mentally deranged? A hysteric?Anti-social? Irresponsible to society? A genius? A rebel angel? A libertarian anarchist? Amoral? And the poet? What could be worse than that that disreputable fellow…

There is something profoundly antithetical about our society and the artist, the poet. On one hand, he is disgraceful; on the other hand he is raised above all other creatures, a quasi spiritual being. We like the face that he is ‘outside the box’ but we really wouldn’t want to go there ourselves. We prefer our own lives to be managed, organised like excel files, and perfectly planned. On the other hand, we want a little bit of the wild, a little bit of a spectacle, an escape from our own lives. The worlds these so called artist provide are a perfect virtuality, a perfect Dionysian escape, so that we can go back to our own lives, appeased, but never ready ourselves to take on that profound rebellion against formality and mechanistic living, that being an authentic artist entails. It is the ‘specialness’ of the artistic posture that kills the living art.

We like art in our society; we equate art with individuality, with being removed from others — the artist is a kind of super-freak. We respect artists if they are famous. If they are not famous, we pity and despise them. They are parasites, feeding on our social welfare system. Some patronise the artist. We respect him/her because they are supposed to be free, unlike the rest of us, who have a real job.. Sometimes we let them be famous after they are dead. We recognise that they had something essential to give us. Too late.

Art doesn’t seem a useful occupation to most — it doesn’t follow the usual formats of time/space, the ones we can measure. That is its virtue, but that is also why it is despised by those whose religion is materiality, who cannot accept the value of something unless it is measured. Once you put a value on it — a few million for a Van Gogh painting — it suddenly has meaning. The fact that we measure the value of something that transcends value, causes the loss of all resonance and meaning, an artwork becomes a cultural artefact, to be reproduces endless on postcards. Its vital quality, the moment of inspiration, then becomes dulled by overexposure and measurement. It becomes more or less of a dead thing. But the very use of art, the very beauty if art, the very life or art is in the very fact that it useless, that cannot be instrumentalised.

I suggest that art could be essential, or at least we could rediscover that dimension. Art could be artisanal as well. Making things, objects of beauty. Not merely useful and utilitarian, but transforming the space. Making the space liveable and breathable.

Art is only utility be accident. It is the most useful thing in the world, by subverting unity. Art has no obvious function in materiality, it reaches towards what is more subtle than the common language. Arts original function is the sacred. Yet we have passed through humanism, which put the human perspective as the centre of the universe, quite wrongly, but on the other hand this was a revolution in perspective. It freed us from the domination of the church and Jehovah. It brought art to the marketplace and the living room. It gave art a political, anthropocentric dimension.

But then came Einstein and relativity. Then the human being was thrown out of the centre and new perspective was born. The centre was no longer us, it was everywhere, and nowhere. We split the atom, we mass produced objects, we seemed to dominate the earth with our technical prowess, at the same time we were destroying the earth.

Where was the artist in this story? He became a marginal figure, a trouble maker mostly. But on the other hand, he was also the liberator. The impressionists liberated light, the cubists liberated space, the expressionists liberated form, the surrealists liberated dreams, modernists liberated narrative — the artist witnessed great upheaval and liberation.

The artist was also the prophet. he saw the coming scream. He saw the advent of totalitarianism, of dehumanisation on an unprecedented scale. He wrote about the trial…

But all this happened before television. before that mass hypnosis called advertising. before post modernism, before the internet.

The rest was just shock. Expressions of shock, from so much devastation, from the Shoah and two world wars, the atomic bomb. the cold war.

Enter post modern. The artist now as media personality. a figure for the new industry called culture and the religion called I, me and mine. He became a pin up, a talking head, an image of youth and beauty, a caricature.

Yet somehow, despite all this corruption he still sings. The authentic expressions never die. They manage to get though the cracks.

But no, in an age of mass extinction, you would think that the artist would also become extinct. Some scientists, on one hand, consider art childish. Spiritual people on the other hand, consider art something beneath them — something they outgrow when they reach subtler realms. But the creators keep coming — the are unstoppable. Because they are the antibodies. They protect the earth from dogma and idealism. Beauty is as necessary as bread — the soul needs to be fed or it become ugly and sterile.

Art needs to rediscover its contemplate roots. It needs to find the sacred again. It was always fed by the sacred anyway. Contemplation IS art. Art is not being loud and giving people your shit — but is about but being receptive and making new languages which elevate society, which heal what has been disfigured.

Contemplation makes artists. It can’t do otherwise. There is a need as essential as breathing to manifest beauty. Contemplation makes artists. It can’t do otherwise. There is a need like breathing to uniquely express THIS.