Bokelskere.no

Unlike ordinary modes of perception, art forgoes the general in things in order to isolate their singularity.

Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.

Today, the propensity to be affected by anything is often perceived as a weakness. Given that we are constantly besieged by aesthetic objects looking to manipulate us (advertising, rhetoric an all the rest), our reservations may be understandable. But unfortunately the guardedness that is so essential to our mental well-being in this media-saturated world also contributes to the rampant apathy that is frosting over the globe like the beginnings of an unprecedented psychic ice-age. Wherever apathy reigns supreme, the "strong" are those who can boast that nothing affects them. Numbness and dumbness become positive qualities, and any passionate engagement with life becomes a cause for embarrassment.

We tend to see our "personal tastes" as positive personality traits, whereas they could just as well indicate limitations that we might overcome given the right opportunity, the appropriate context, and a little courage. Each person's take on reality will no doubt favor certain aesthetic experiences over others, but it may be that the world is filled with potential aesthetic experiences that our "tastes" prevent us from having for no good reason.

Any adequate response to the mystery of existence must be poetic, for only the poetic can take on the "why."

In a sense the first artist was not the painter in the cave but whoever dared give an answer to the enigma of the night sky with its million stars.

It is a strange thing to catalog the conflicting theories as to what the first artists thought they were doing down there in the caves, because the truth is that, to this day, we do not know why we make art. In the end, art may not be our invention at all. It may well have appeared in history as it does in the life of many individual artists:as an outside call, a sudden flash of inspiration, an inner wanderlust exerting such a powerfull pull that ultimately we would have to say that Picasso got it wrong: the early humans didn't invent art. Art invented humanity.