And today\u2019s reason we are an endangered species is: art. No, not the \u201cmovies\u201d you see on tiktok or the slur of paint smeared across a canvas by some instagram celebrity who dipped her arm elbow deep in yellow paint and calls it painting, or the half-baked essay handed in by your \u201cgenius\u201d of a high school sophomore, copy\/pasted ten minutes before history class from his phone\u2019s ChatGPT app he hides in a folder called \u201cBrain\u201d. Although some might claim these are all art, I beg to differ. I myself can\u2019t give you a clear definition of what art is, but I\u2019m sure it is worth living for and there were people in history who also argued it was worth dying for. Some say it\u2019s holy, some say it is what the soul is made of. Then again, some say soy milk is milk, so\u2026
There are a million ways to go about defining art and depending on which definition you go with, its purpose may also differ. Is it for soul-searchers? Is it a propaganda tool? Is it the dimwitted toy of the petit bourgeoisie? I can\u2019t and won\u2019t pretend to have the courage to even define it myself, so what I\u2019ll do instead is rely on minds much greater than my own to see what they thought about what we\u2019re faced with.
Bertold Brecht thinks \u201cArt is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.\u201d Well, fairly straight forward, then again, he did write The Threepenny Opera and had his Marxist leanings, what the hell did he know? He\u2019d throw the bathwater out with the baby.
John Cheever, American novelist often known as the Chekhov of the Suburbs said \u201cArt is the triumph over chaos.\u201d So when will we let art take over completely? I could use a little less chaos and a little more art. Perhaps we all could\u2026
And modern day heroes like Banksy come along, who say things like “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable\u201d. In its essence, once again, anti-establishment. But then again, all art is. If art is not the system, then it is not art: it is propaganda.
One of my all time favorite painters, Marc Chagall said \u201cGreat art picks up where nature ends.\u201d Although I know he did not mean it like that, but let\u2019s hope we won\u2019t get to nature\u2019s end entirely, because the pace at which current society is headed for the end of nature, there won\u2019t be anything left for art to pick up.
Plato, on the other hand said that an artist\u2019s work is a \u201cshadow of the divine perfection\u201d. To that, I say: let\u2019s bring it out into the light We\u2019ve been hiding perfection for too long and our time seems to be rather limited.
Now, you don\u2019t need to take any of these great definitions to heart. By all means, create your own. Just do this one thing, if you please: recognize that us, humans, of all species have been gifted with this incredible talent of creating things out of our imagination. Let\u2019s thrive for imagining something better, then, and not something so much worse that we\u2019ll end up saying: it\u2019s so terrible, you can\u2019t even imagine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And today\u2019s reason we are an endangered species is: art. No, not the \u201cmovies\u201d you see on tiktok or the slur of paint smeared across a canvas by some instagram celebrity who dipped her arm elbow deep in yellow paint and calls it painting, or the half-baked essay handed in by your \u201cgenius\u201d of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1690,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-read"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1688"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1696,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1688\/revisions\/1696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.weareendangeredspecies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}