There is more subtlety and more nuance in real human relationships than in any work created by an artist (by artist, I am not referring to pop artists or celebrities, but creators whose art most people don’t “get”). One might even suggest that artists lack a sense for human artifice, and that this is why they retreat into their art. However, by creating art that puts people off, artists reveal some profound aspects of ritualing and the qualiadelic experience.
Over the recent centuries, artists have learned to produce works marked by ambiguity, whose meanings are purposely left unclear. Often, because we don’t understand it, the mystery and the wonder of the work is transferred to the artist. It is the artist, not the art, who holds some magic key, some ineffable genius that the rest of us lack.
What really goes on is that art these days reflects the human landscape, forcing us to see the sublime reality of ourselves as a species in decay; revealing our loss of harmony with the beauty and growth of ecosystems. It is not a pleasant experience, and we avoid facing it the way we generally avoid exposing ourselves to any poverty and suffering.
This puts the artist into the role of a modern shaman, or a contemporary court jester. They seem to exist in some alternate, enviable (albeit dangerous) reality. They are a throwback to an earlier age, when conscious ritualing was more common.
Today we value our privacy – it helps protect us from seeing ourselves reflected “in the eyes of all the lonely men who reach for anything they can to keep from going home.” Not long ago, however, we had no private space of our own. Our communities were us. There wasn’t a great deal of individualism – everybody had their roles and that is how, for the most part they were known. But there were different temperaments, and in the rituals of daily life when one’s temperament flared up, people stepped back.
In the temperamental past people were skilled ritualers, and they knew how to act out to create privacy in public. Today, we consider ourselves as more or less mature, and we have lost our prowess at ritualing. God forbid we should make a public spectacle of ourselves.
It is the artists, now, who retain the old temperamental nature, who still have the ability to ritual consciously, who still have the ability to create private space in public, who really do hold the key to changing the world.
Artists must submit to the gaze of their audience. The magic key that the artist has, the power, is the ability to create a private space in the middle of the public, as in an opening at a gallery, or a play, or a concert. Artists are, perhaps, never more alone than when they are in the “zone” before the eyes of all their audience.
The artistic legerdemain is with symbols, ideas – qualia – and their goal is something ineffable and unknown. As a race, people have to find privacy among the crowd instead of isolating ourselves from the sublime ills of our culture. If we can look the human landscape in the eye, as the artist does, we just might see beyond it to the beautiful healing power of ecosystems.