WHAT ART IS, AND ISN'T

People often say that advertising is art, and on face value it certainly looks artistic but really, here it's just a failure to discriminate. Advertising is creative, but it isn't art, for true art, is always trying to change your perception of the world. In order to do that it has to have behind it a thought process. This thought process informs the work of art with a depth of meaning. True art is the end product that thought process.

In advertising there is no thought process, only ideas themselves manipulated in a clever way to give you the impression of art without it’s actual content. An advert does not want to change your perception of the world. Only perhaps your perception of your need for a certain product or what that product does. Advertising then does not have and ‘inner life’. There is no movement within it. It isn’t going anywhere, in the sense that it will lead you forwards into a new and better understanding of what it means to be alive.

Now. There’s nothing wrong with advertising. If you have a product you need to make people aware of that product. However. It is business, not art. We need to see clearly, ironically, the fog of confusion that envelops things like this and how all of us end up living in this fog, continually mistaking one thing for another, the result of which is we fail to reap that much valued crop of true knowledge, which is the product of discriminating clearly between things.

Put another way this is saying that advertising falsifies the world it presents us with by removing all the pain form that world and then encouraging us to identify with it! Which can do, and it is a fine and ‘jim-dandy’ world to live in, for it is wonderful to live in a pain-free world and have a blissful time; until of course something negative does surface, and we are forced to acknowledge through illness, boredom, whatever, a deeper level, but by then of course it will be too late, and we will experience this negative thing in a very unproductive and unenlightening way. Our lack of consciousness will trip us up quite indefatigably.

Now. This isn’t rocket science. Artists as individuals have always preferred reality over illusion, and have struggled to express that. This is something extremely obvious and simple and it’s this simplicity which defeats us. People will protest ‘but it can’t be that simple’!!!! Or they will say, ‘but that’s not new’! Which is true. It isn’t. But some things are unfortunately universal. Some things you will have to come to terms with. You cannot have them how you want them. They will also say that things must be mindless because we need mindless fun. It is a release without which we would die, or something. But this again is just more advertising in sense that advertising is always excluding something, like pain, or reality, and this attitude excludes the possibility that life could ever be different or that we could other things uplifting and fun, heaven forbid!

So what is art? Ultimately, real art, true art, is anything which does not pander to our wish fulfillment weakness in order to exploit that in some way to gain ‘power over’, status, financial reward. It is anything which does not lie to us. True art accepts responsibility by telling us the truth of pain and darkness in order that we may be equipped with it, in order to deal with it, when it does surface in our lives. So in some ways true art will strike us as wrong in some way. Paradoxically it will strike us as the opposite of what it is. It will seem false when it actually is true. Weird.

We live at a point in time when, as we well know, ‘art’ has been assimilated into the business community. Consequently artists must now become ‘brands’ that you market in much the same way you would market any other product. Like say baked beans. A quick, easy to consume, sweet product, but remember, a mass- produced rather soulless product. So that what as artist is saying now, the ‘meaning’ of what they do, is now of much much less importance that how well it can be branded and sold. Now the artist is created by the ‘art world’, not the art world existing to serve the individual vision of the artist. Now for an artist it is now about materializing your inner truth or a truth of life but about about materializing some kind of marketable mass truth or ‘concept’, as in ‘conceptual’, that will be what galleries are looking for and be in tune with ‘groupthink’. It is all very Orwellian. Now you could say something radical but that would be because people want to hear something radical, that is chic, and it would simply have no radical effect. It would be just playing the art game. Remember. The art world is an institution and like all institutions it is self-serving and self-interested. As long as it can go on believing in it’s own myth, all is fine. Nevermind the toxix stink of death, stagnation and decay. The ant-noise of mindless crowds troughing down on the next ‘batman’ extravaganza! Nevermind the grey sterile boredom leaking out of every fast food funfair and infecting gay life with a morbid virus of truth and inertia. THINK!

Granny’s in the coal house with a government man
In shades talkin’ turkey to an ole buzzard with the blues
Who sold your trainers to pay his dues
& you YOUS!!!
You’re in the alley trying to drum up interest
In your next world war, the one with extra horrors
Narrated by Jane Horrocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!