Art’s counter-culture, doctor however diverse, holds in plain sight what the material world denies – love and imagination. Art is made out of both – a passionate reckless love of the work in its own right, as though nothing else exists, and an imaginative force that creates something new out of disparate material. Art’s experiments are not funded by huge State programmes, venture capital, or junk bonds, they are done when someone picks up a pen or a brush, or sits down at the piano, or takes a piece of clay and changes it forever.
A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.
Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy, for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no short cuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. There is only the experience.
Art can’t change your life – its not a diet programme or the latest guru – it offers no quick fixes. What art can do, is to prompt in us authentic desire. By that I mean it can waken us to truths about ourselves and our lives; truths that normally lie suffocated under the pressure of the twenty-four hour emergency zone called real life. Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find, is ours.