VALIS

Art is not a thing; it is a way. Musicians find themselves pressured to create music that sells is becoming less of an art form. Music must be born out of a craving desire to channel yourself. Paul Knee stated it best when he said, “Art does not reproduce what is visible; it makes things visible” “Entertainment gives you a predictable pleasure. Art… leads to transformation. It awakens you, rather than just satisfying a craving.

 Entertainment just requires passive receivers, whereas art demands purposeful action that awakens your soul. Certain genres of music have become almost formulaic because writers are forced to follow stock templates of what’s expected to happen where (i.e., the first chorus coming in 20 seconds in). The art is driven first by the desire to please a consumer base. When marketing drives the production of music, the resulting outcome is music that lacks meaning.

ART AS THE BIG BANG

Art is a meeting place in which human beings commune at a level that ordinary language and sign systems do not allow. The work of art is apolitical and free of moralism. Art opposes tyranny by freeing beauty from the clutches of the powers of this world. “The artist,” Wilde said, “is free to express everything.” “It is precisely the absence of political and moral interest that makes art an agent of liberation wherever it appears,” he adds. “Only the revelation of beauty can save our world,” 

The artist does not choose the prophecy. Rather, the prophetic shines through his work. It comes from elsewhere. The artist therefore needs enough courage to stay true to the work at hand. Even greater courage is required of those to whom the finished work is given. Only through art can human beings express and share the archetypal powers that shape the universe. To abandon art would mean forfeiting the gift of vision, which, by all appearances, was given to humans alone. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Art is mysterious because its purpose is unknown and its effect always exceeds the ends we put it to.

Art’s primary quality makes it a suitable sign for those who want to legitimize their authority. Art may be something before it becomes all the things we claim it to be. So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters

Herzog: Discovery of the Chauvet Cave is closer to the hypothetical unearthing of extraterrestrial artifacts than we might initially think. In the images we see them moving about the cave like pilgrims in a Gothic cathedral or space explorers. One scientist reports having overpowering dreams during his first foray into the caves. These “memories from long forgotten dreams,” as Herzog calls the paintings, seem to belong to “a familiar but distant universe” 

The only human figurations are a series of handprints and the partial figure of a woman. The cave paintings include some of the oldest known at the time of this writing, dating back over thirty thousand years. The images are naturalistic yet highly stylized, strange yet beautiful. They are not crude or naive, but exhibit a high degree of technical skill, especially when we note the uneven surfaces and primitive materials. 

A bull is given eight legs to create the illusion of movement, and a rhinoceros is shown thrusting its horns into the air. The painters deliberately placed these dynamic images in parts of the cave untouched by the light of day. Through Herzog’s lens, we see them moving about the cave like pilgrims. One scientist reports having overpowering dreams during his first foray into the caves. He dreams of supernatural lions, “powerful things” who showed him a new, “indirect” way of understanding. 

 The same lost culture also fashioned ivory fashioned flutes designed to play a full pentatonic scale. The cave paintings are some some some of the most beautiful images of our time. But we also get a glimpse of something like a shared humanity. The images seem to reach into a stranger part of ourselves, something reaching to the depths. Art may not be our invention at all, Herzog writes. 

The mind acquires a kind of second sight when it is freed from the bind of immediate biological need, he says. For a human being, a block of cheddar contains countless potentialities.

 “Art invented humanity” is a powerful pull, and ultimately we would have to say that Picasso got it wrong, he adds. The author was referring to the work of Pablo Picasso, who said that the first artists had “invented everything” in the form of art. In the creative imagination, things are revealed to humans that are hidden from the rest of the known cosmos. 

Art is paranormal, an anomaly casting doubt upon our most cherished certainties about the nature of reality. We do not know why we make art, but we cannot subtract it from our self-image as a species without losing the thing that makes us what we are. Art discloses our own mystery even as it lays bare the mystery of consciousness.

The Chauvet Cave is one in a long list of archaeological finds revealing the aesthetic genius of the Upper Paleolithic. “Art invented humanity” as an outside call, a sudden flash of inspiration, an inner wanderlust. In the end, art may not be our invention at all. 

1 Humans didn’t invent art, but rather art invented humanity

Probably, art (art as such, shamanism, magic, religion) preceded the development of differentiated self awareness 

3 Then art forked into two. Acceptable art denotes the use of aesthetics to manipulate emotions in a predetermined manner, and also forks into two. OOH porn videos, advertising and generic pop songs, 2 OTOH propaganda and message films

4 The second fork is Proper Art: it uses the aesthetic to reveal things in their original preconceptual “likeness”. That is, it doesn’t reduce its content to some instrumental end. In doing this artist end up producing symbols that point to vast untapped regions of reality

5 In other words art belongs on the same plane as information physics, dreams etc. We are becoming a society without art in which people are starting to lack the most effective means to envision realities beyond the ideological horizon.

Art has a quality that exceeds their conceptual signification

Art oxygenates society by infusing it with a more expansive reality than its preconceptions allow for. Its not up to artists to produce works that will change the world. It’s up to the world to organize itself in a way that artists are able to make the art they’re called to make. Art is better than philosophy for what is enveloped in the sign is more profound than all the explicit significations

Art is more fundamentally connected to the soul than therapy is. Plotinus said the only reason there are gods is because of beauty, if there wasn’t beauty there’d only be theology. Theories about the gods. But because of Aphrodite we can see and taste and feel their radiance

Termite-tapeworm-fungus-Moss-art goes always forward eating it’s own boundaries”