Why people fear art
by Jon Rappoport
August 10, 2013
When I say art, I don’t mean movies in which alien machines attack shopping malls.
Remember novels, poems, plays, paintings?
Art.
In the last 20 years, more and more people have become obsessed with Pattern. Finding it in events, information, energy, everything.
Obvious Pattern, hidden Pattern, secret Pattern, symbolic Pattern.
On top of that, governments search for patterns in their trillions of pieces of surveilled data.
The discovery, for example, that a flower and snail and a galaxy reveal identical mathematics is taken to indicate something sacred. Only a decline in IQ can explain such a conclusion.
One may as well fall into a worshipful trance because windows, tables, and moving vans reveal rectangles.
Art, however, isn’t based on pattern. And that becomes a problem. It stops the puerile mind in its tracks.
College literature professors deconstruct novels into “political power relationships based on oppression.” Never mind what the author was actually doing. The professors will make proper corrections. They’ll tune up their students to see Marx’s critique of capitalism in everything from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to War and Peace to Hamlet.
Pattern.
But art refutes pattern. It drops it by the side of the road. It communicates something far more complex, something that has no easy label.
People try to put art through a meat grinder of one fundamentalism or another.
Maybe they’d like to try that with the subject of love. They’d arrive at the same dead-end.
If all art has a message, it’s this: manipulation/control is a thief in the night; it steals life-force from everything it touches; without it, life and consciousness rise to new levels, and this experience is the gateway into the great unpredictable unknown, which people yearn for.
The unknown. Frontier. Adventure. New ideas. The end of grinding boredom. Art.
Art destroys the lowest common denominator, and that act is now considered a sin, because governments and their allied corporate partners are dedicated, under the false flag of “humanity,” to creating a dead sea-level commonality for all. A welfare-state of the mind and soul.
Great painters like Velasquez and Gorky, great poets like Hart Crane and Yeats, can’t be translated down into simple terms. Neither can the human mind. Unless coercion and surrender are the best political ideas the human race can offer.
People fear art because they fear mystery that doesn’t resolve into solutions. They sense that art is describing a reality in which imagination triumphs and therefore dissolves the context of repetitive daily life.
People want endless repetition. It soothes them like a drug. It confirms their rigorous conviction that options are limited and the game is simple and small.
Shrunken individuals, shrunken thoughts, shrunken desires, shrunken joy, shrunken creation, shrunken satisfaction, shrunken perception. The modern lie: “we are all the same.”
Art refutes all that with a thunderbolt.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
It’s been a game, set & match on art and arts in general for a long time now. Because our jobs have been shipped out and destroyed for decades now, and in parallel the entire notion of “work for pay” is going away thanks to the psychopaths that run our world, people cannot see the big picture: No more jobs, except as slaves. And you can forget about anything else (arts or art in general- hah!).
So they keep sending their children to colleges and universities to secure six-figure debt and a worthless degree because they still have the mentality engrained in them from decades ago: Diploma = guaranteed (good/well-paying) job. In the process, since jobs are so hard to come by in any fields today, they push their kids into the remaining lifeboats of this economy – banking, economics, etc. etc. where the last vestiges of ‘secure’ jobs are.
You want to be a poet, linguist, artist, musician. You want to create? You want to dream? Forget about it. Don’t even think about it. Again, more short-sightedness as they can’t see the big picture. Our culture and civilization are being destroyed right in front of us as we continue to go to fake universities to get fake degrees so we can then chase the fake jobs, to keep the fake economy going, to earn fake money to consume fake things in support of our fake lives.
Is there a soul alive that isn’t moved by the art, the architecture, the music, the poetry, the language, the fashion, the etc. etc. etc. of centuries ago? There can be no more Beethovens, Bachs, Rembrandts, Van Goghs, Da Vincis, Cummings, Poes in our Brave New World.
Yet people still – REFUSE to see the big picture: the black & white, sterile, colorless, dystopian soulless future we are creating for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. Not only do they not see it, they are embracing and championing the Orwellian nightmare being driven through their hearts by their very slavemasters.
Shrunken punken dildo darts and fearsome woolly mammoth farts sleeping dreaming fits and starts breaking meager brittle hearts to wonder as the red sea parts that led us to the somber lizard tale wall marts
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I was an English major with 30 English credits but ended up switching to Accounting because I just couldn’t take the deconstruction of poetry and literature any longer. Finding patterns in Accounting is to be expected; finding patterns in Coleridge poems is not. Besides, English was far too simple.
I wrote a paper in a few hours “showing” Hamlet & Horatio were gay lovers and got a 96… Any tongue in cheek theory I proposed off the top of my head was either eagerly accepted or had “serious” scholarly works devoted to the truly ridiculous ideas I would throw out in class for a laugh. I even submitted a paper about AAVE in ebonics and received an A+… It WAS a brilliant paper and I still remember the opening line, “Izza pimp tight thang George Orwell iz dead.”
This is absolutely true! My first experience with this was in an advanced placement English lit course, in high school. Given the assignment to write an extensive essay on the theme of alienation which a poet MEANT to express in his works, I had to first explore the poet’s life history (as a means of attempting to understand ways that he experienced alienation), to understand what he MAY have intended by his work. And yet, my straight-A mind could not grasp why or how my paper earned … a D! So for the first and only time in my academic life, I challenged the professor’s grade (his only comment on my paper was “This is more suited for a psychology course”). Why, I asked my professor, is my essay “wrong?” I did not know the poet personally, couldn’t know for a fact what his work was intended to mean, so all I could do was speculate, and nobody could do more than that, since the poet himself was long dead. The teacher literally did NOT respond (or maybe he did, but I could not process it at the time?). After a few moments of silence, I remember leaving the room in tears. My report card grade was A, and because this paper was the bulk of the quarter’s point value, I can only assume he reassessed the grade of my paper. I remained confused until I read this article, many decades after the fact. I think he was looking for some sort of cookie-cutter interpretation of what an author meant, but without having first explained to us the “correct” cookie-cutter framework, it was entirely illogical to assume one could identify it out of thin air. Thus, even those who are supposed to “teach” are victims of this desire to identify only agreed-upon patterns, and are terrified not only of art, but of any interdisciplinary approach to interpretation that somehow conflicts with their singular, linear mindset.
Jon,
Perhaps we are all artists but just unaware of it.
Thank you,
Jerry
Art defined = to be
“Wherefore art thou?”
“To be, or not to be: that is the question”
The right “to be” living outside of the confines of the comfortable box is what a few thrive upon, whereas the rest, expect the system created comforts (heh) zone to exist. This matrix, carries them, however ugly, to their demise because of a false trust, laziness, fear or whatever, nevertheless, it is a choice.
Art, to be or not to be, that is a choice.
Tremendous!
If it can’t be categorized, how can it be marketed? Art needs to be sold twice; once for the money and a second time for the message. Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison conveyed more to me by the feelings and images their words evoked than any attempt at explaining their lyrics could achieve.
Jon, your words do the same for me. I read them and then get lost in the wilderness of my mind. You give a rare gift to your readers and I thank you for it.
“The end of grinding boredom. Art.” -That’s a nifty definition I intend to quote with due credit to a profound and funny human being. All your writings are worth ingesting, but I know this one will be soul food for the rest of my pattern-altering artistic life. I appreciate your intelligence, your great ideas and your courage. Thank you for this.
As a concert standard pianist, I know too well the preoccupation with noise and speed. It does not require genius to play fast and loud. Music is beyond taste. It is finesse. The arts have been “processed” by a system more confident in the issuance of credentials than the ability to deliver. The system is rotten to the core and any proliferating talent is unsupported and purely accidental.
[…] conversation we discuss Jon’s own artwork, his philosophy of art and reality, “Why People Fear Art,” how art impacts consciousness, the potential for art as propaganda, and many other topics. […]