On the New York Art World, or Why I am Not An Artist

 17 Thermidor 220

FADING LIGHT, DEAD SNAKES

(A Short Piece on the New York Art World, Written From My Commune in the Desert)

            Prelude:  Time is running out in the fading light – there is only perhaps less than an hour of daylight left by which to write, and now I want to write outdoors/outside – there is no comfortable place here indoors /inside to write.  The crude minds here make things uncomfortable and ugly, and seem not to know this, but it’s a little bit better still when I’m outside.

            I keep looking for snakes here in the desert, and there are almost none.  I consider snakes my protectors, spiritually and symbolically.  My inference from the fact that there have not been any lately has been that there is nothing to fear.  Yet, the last snake I saw was dead in the road.  Are my protectors fighting for me and dying, in some sense?  This snake’s dead body was facing east, and I’m about to go to the East, but dreading it. 

            What could the snake have been protecting me from – trying to protect me from? I’m not sure how to interpret the decimation of my protections, but soon the fading light will force me inside, so let me try to set forth an idea before this happens.

           

            Back in New York I’m immersed in a world of artists it seems, and they somehow both are and are not my ilk.  I emerge from this immersion in the world of desperate artists feeling alienated again, because these artists are too ignorant of the political. 

            Like the artists though, I operate in the world of the outsider, because I have integrity.  It’s funny how at the present time, with reference to anything on the outside, people fling out the label “artist”.  I cringe at the question “Are you an artist?”, and I guess that’s because I know what it indicates.  One thing that it indicates is that what is outside, what is “different”, what has integrity, and whatever does not make life prosaic, is packaged for the consumption of the common, of the dullards, of the prosaicizers, as “artist”. 

            In the realm of politics this packaging for a media audience of slaves posing as persons is the label “activist”, which neutralizes real resistance to the rule of the dull-witted yet powerful, and further distances the possibility of one’s taking on the mantle of “revolutionary”.  Most all of the artists are unaware of this packaging of “artist” as “everything which is, though not directly threatening to it, is symbolic of the rejection of  business and markets, of the status quo, for the inside”. Art and the artist are themselves packaged as outside, but still consumable and thus comprehensible insofar as they are not threatening – to be an artist in the New York mode now is to be something like a vacation for the bourgeoisie, a wonder or marvel which they consume from a safe distance while remaining exploitative and abusive cowards.   I find New York artists quite unaware of this, as when they actually believe that art alone can effect political change, but I find them even less aware though of a concomitance to this reality, and that is the conflation of art and culture.

            The artists of New York seem less and less to really know aspects of culture other than pure art, aspects such as politics, linguistics, and philosophy, so it follows that everything that is “counterculture” is easily bundled together and politically neutralized for consumption by “the gray people”, as Sandra Good called them, in its appellation as “art” and “artist”, with artists neither making any objections to this nor acting from an awareness of the broader culture.  Since the consciousness necessary to understand this packaging and neutralization itself comes in part from other elements of culture that the New York artists do not seem to really know, elements of culture such as politics and philosophy, “art” as the production of works that are traditionally called art strictly speaking is aggrandized to cover over all of culture, as if art were culture itself.  This very phenomenon, however, is possible only when one lacks a real knowledge of the full spectrum of culture and of how politically neutralized artists really are.  Artists do not control interpretation, but rather must engage with other aspects of culture (e.g. political power) in order to affect taste, interpretation, and action. The monodimensionality of the New York artist and the absurd belief that pure art alone can change the political landscape is a guarantee of political neutralization, and this neutralization of artists has happened to such a degree that,  even the most aware artists, who are few in number, and who are politically engaged beyond their artwork as is necessary, are so engaged merely as “activists” (read: harmless to the powers that be) and not as “revolutionaries” (read:  dangerous and real menaces to the powers that be).

Considering this state of affairs, since I am a revolutionary, I must now say that I am not an artist.