SO LONG, FAREWELL, GOODBYE

Why is the son of Satan always named Damien? It's so bloody tiresome.

And speaking of tiresome, this will be the last time I write about this oaf. After a while ragging on a subject over and over is as pointless and dreary as writing about it each time a bird craps on the car.

Damien Hirst, gad. Great Britain's art equivalent to a high school fart joke. Thief and supporter and apologist for the 9-11 terrorists (he offered them his congratulations), he has finally cut loose his 2008 "For Heaven's Sake." No doubt held back these three years while the market rose to restore the comfort level of his fans. (He had to buy his last effort himself.) This next earth shaking "objet d' qu'est-ce que foutre!?" is another sadder version of an earlier sparkly skull. It's one of his queerest (and most disingenuous) pocket-lining decoupage projects. In his own words, "If you get away with bad art it's good art," and "I'm no genius, just lucky." Your lips to God's ear!

He is the grubby hero of rich has-been rock stars fading into pock marked junkies who pass the lazy days blowing guys in public toilets. His coterie seek to recast respectable names for themselves as serious patrons and important collectors. They and those like them buy self aggrandizement by paying any bizarre price for the meaningless and juvenile musings of a former high school smart ass. You remember this guy. We all had one at some point....a free-range grunt whose trademark was to piss into the trash can in the back of the classroom to make the guys laugh.

His pretense, as artist, is to rediscover the "beauty and fragility" of life - and pointing out the gross vulgarity of society. To him that means hiring people to do everything for him, wouldn't want to get tangled up in actually making art, now. His new stroke is farming out the application of beaucoup bucks worth of glitter on a human baby's skull. He picked it up years ago in an estate collection of 19th century medical specimens. In his peculiar reality paving deadbaby with diamonds was just the ticket. A damning commentary by one pure and brave, wise, unflinchingly mirroring society's shallow materialism. Bold and steely eyed honesty from a mechanic's son Moses pointing down from a holy mount of cash. "Woe unto you, for you sin a great sin in your over-spending, vanity and pompous ways!" Damien sucks hard at the teat of the top drawer market of vapid, materialist sycophants. Cleverly hawking his own boorish, vapid and materialist crafts directly to those he curses. Pretty sharp! Elmer Gantry pretends to be artist (while his staff of 150 do any actual work).

But, no, not an artist. This is a crafts designer. A fashion designer. A carny. A puffed, doughy leach made flabby from sucking off the limitless vulgarity of his nouveau-riche clientele. But, finally, just a gauche designer sucking cash off a clique within the art collecting community as deep as cellophane and horny for acknowledgement.

His intellectual cowardliness is numbing. His hands are unsullied by his own work. In his silly and pretentious biology class stunt "St Sebastian," a still-born baby bull was decoratively pickered with oh-so-grisly looking and artified jet-black arrows (designed to be thicker than normal arrows for that extra dramatic punch). He hadn't the balls to be part of the society he pretends to accuse and take the animal's life himself. If you're going to be a swine then do it. Be a real bastard. But he's too much bourgeoisie, too squeamish to demonstrate the brutality he accuses the rest of society of by strangling the baby bull. Neither did he murder the animal by tying it down to hammer arrows into the writhing, howling creature. He sent a servant out who bought a limp, silent meat market carcass and carefully had someone else decorate it with faux arrows and then string it up in a tub of pickle juice. At least the otherwise forgettable Adres Serrano actually pissed on the crucifix he accused us of desecrating. So, other than his own shallow greed and his marketing team and collectors...who exactly is he accusing? Only himself, his agents and his own vapid collectors, that's who.

It is not excess displayed by "society," as Damien hypocritically pretends. It's only the manipulative, soulless emptiness and rank hubris of himself and those hollow creatures drawn to him. It's truly a brilliant marketing strategy. Say your work condemns the emptiness of ...anyone crass enough to buy your work.

He proves at most a teenage angst designer, a high-end glue-gun crafts hobbyist taking a child's skull, sending it off to a jeweler with the instruction to pave the thing, and make it pricey dammit! A shiny little tchotchke to go on a coffee table. You know, like you'd buy at any furniture outlet. Except this is for the high-end design mart shopper. Every little diamond numbered, counted by color, and platinum, not that common gold, and loads of the shit! His fumy design born of boredom and avarice cobbled by some nameless schmo in a jewelry workshop. And for what? Faaaabulousness! Thousands of diamonds screwed onto some nobody's dead baby's skull. "Noboddaddy's" child. And so a righteous (hungry) Damien points an accusatory finger at....well, at himself and his brassy, haute groupies who think a showy purchase could make them valid entities in the art world, respectable, cerebral. Sadly, they're right about that.

Ultimately, though, this kind of work will not stand in art history to damningly point an accusing finger at society. It will be seen for what it is - an odd, expensive decoration. It's accusatory digit will always only point directly at the craven, obsequiousness - the shallow avarice of the artist who made it and the tinselly folk who paid his fee.

These over-wrought, grotesque ornaments are not a symbol of the failure of society. They are, however, the essence and emblem of the debasing of fine art by a strictly cash-driven art industry moved by hucksters and art-carnies. It is a new more rigid and brittle, hide bound Academy - the Academy of the cash drawer. Money alone validates work. . . in the short term.

Art, authentic art, has - will always serve to draw society, individuals toward a greater depth of being. We expand emotionally, intellectually, our sense of spirit increases through the seeing, the knowing of art objects of deep, great meaning. And, yes, sometimes hideous, dark in their beauty - and their beauty may only be in their cruelly unflinching truth and intensity of thought and the vibrations left by the artist's touch.

But, these currently fashionable glittery, faux-terrible trifles serve only one purpose in art and its history- to draw the dull and crass kitsch mavens to write ever fatter cheques in a pointless attempt to buy their way out of their own intellectual toilet. Sad. They themselves are the social collapse they bemoan and today's art discourse is the poorer for their wealth of folly.

NON SUM QUALIS ERAM

They die in tiny steps. Some days greater leaps. One lid no longer opens as brightly as the other eye's. The words of still delightful conversation often made thick and slurred by tongues forgetting their skill. She phones five times in ten minutes to ask the same simple question and to say "just thinking of you." When we hug goodbye she always whispers "I love you" as if to help me store the phrase for the coming time when she will no longer remember who I am.

His stoicism and sharpness are eroding to a softer, almost boyish round-edged affability. He dotes on her. Once a gruff and surly husband now become devoted servant, secretary, housekeep. He makes her milkshakes with hidden doses of protein and calories to slow the evaporation of her muscles. He plays a game of grouchily demanding she remember this or that, slyly coaching her to refuse to become resigned to forgetfulness. He demands she continue to fight this already lost war until there's nothing left. They strive to push back against the inevitable for as long as possible. Soon the day will come when even her muscles forget, forget how to walk, how to chew, even to swallow. But for now it's time to fight and keep the bastard back. Even if by millimeters keep back the goddamn thief that will sooner or later steal one of them from the other. Knowing, too, that one of them won't know no matter who is taken first.

They rise with pain, bent, walk with a small, weaving gait that still carries a faint sheen of the polish and pride of coming from two proud ancient lines. Their bodies bend more and more over time, but not their dignity.

Broken skin, numberless spots and causeless wounds now lay siege to her once delicate face. Still, the blemishes of age have not yet fully breached the soft, thin skin above her cheeks. Her eyes can still flash an imperious, scolding glance or earnest, childlike want. When something unwelcome is said they still wound with shocking immediacy. But death's power of imminent domain is always laying claim, marking its increase with the spotty toe prints of infiltrating demise, clawing toward her lids, annexing the once pale, ivory, silken skin around her eyes, eyes that could always soothe or savage with the slightest shift of her mood.

He goes to bed early. He escapes in sleep the grinding endless end that is unfolding. And alone he rises in the darkness before dawn to sip coffee and read the paper while she sleeps later and later each morning. Last month she left a small foot stool in the middle of the floor. No reason. Before she went to bed the stool just came to mind and so needed to be brought out. In the dark the next morning he tripped on it, fell full on his head. Five small gashes, a concussion, maybe a small fracture and bleeder. But, "it is nothing and no I won't go to the goddamn Dr."

So I watch him during each day's visit. Watch behind our chatter for signs of an emergency. He is afraid. Afraid he may have to be hospitalized. Afraid that she will not have him for a day or even two. He knows she will dissolve into panicked terror. We've seen it before during a dawn to midnight hospital stay for his eye surgery. Even though I stayed with her every minute, sat with her at the hospital, would've slept at their house, his absence was horror itself. Her confusion instantaneous. The hours before his surgery, the wait during. She became more and more afraid, even hostile. "Why are we here? Where is this place?" Soothing words, distracting questions about long dead relatives brought quick laughter, but, only distracted for a moment, a moment that shrank more with each passing moment. She clutched my hand and said "You're my good scout" a dozen times. A second later almost wailing, desperate to bolt, and yet even more terrified by not knowing where to run or why.

When she is sick in the ER I hold her head and coo "this is normal, try to relax into it" when the morphine makes her vomit. I slip her boney hand, delicate, transparent skin above blue veins and tendons, under my shirt when the IV solution makes her so cold her hand and arm ache like they're broken. I speak with a calm and cheerful lie of panic when I call the nurse in to control her pulse and plummeting pressure. As if to reassure him I wink at my father who is rubbing her always freezing feet and pressing them against his belly. Though calm and placid to others I see him numb with desperate terror. He is nearly deaf and the isolation adds to his horror. I am there to hear for him. I corner the haughty Dr who ignored her nurse and then my questions. I berate him for his ignorance and sullen, casual disregard. He's upset his Fourth of July has been interrupted. I bully him. I have him barred from the hospital when he asks if I'd "prefer her conscious or knocked out while she's at home."

I think of my secret muse. The goddess faced one. A friend I have only met in notes exchanged. I think of her and her own friend who would've died alone but for the night-long race to reach her before the last breath. She held her friend's hand, hugged her body close while she died. My lovely muse spent herself, drained herself of all she had to spend the last hours of a life in stories and laughter and songs and sadness. She came to her friend whose own ugly children ignored her. Petulant fools made bitter by some meaningless bruise they chose to treasure up and are now made irreparably poor, shabby, odious.

And after it all, and now "it" is every day in one form or another, after it all I paint. I paint and I beg the color to rise and sharpen. I push back to ponder and stare and curse my own illness and pain and fatigue. I plead with the paint to rise to the intensity I want to feel. I am rich with life because I am cursed with the great good fortune to be the one who gets to be here, to see, to help my parents die as well as they deserve. I'll draw on these foul, sweet days of ending for as long as I paint. And I hate it. And I am grateful for it.

BACHELARD AND MALRAUX COME TO FORT WORTH

Here in Fort Worth on the prairie of North Texas stands a unique strand of rare architectural pearls. Three neighboring museums, each of which represents an architectural master's work. The first is Philip Johnson's Amon Carter Museum. Next, across its wide lawn is Louis Kahn's remarkable Kimbell Museum, itself soon to include a uniquely discreet and yet aesthetically audacious addition by Renzo Piano. Then, across a shaded street the third and to my taste most flawless pearl is Tadao Ando's remarkable vision housing The Modern Museum of Art in Fort Worth.

Recently I spent a wonderful afternoon in Ando's brilliantly conceived space that houses the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. The Modern holds a somewhat dark, but extraordinary collection of top tier art. I had been invited by a dear friend, she of multi-layered and complex spirit with a deep love of art, to lead a tour through their collection and comment for her and several friends and then to visit three easel paintings across the street at The Kimbell; a Picasso, a Braque (both from 1911 that seem to affirm Arne Glimcher and Bernice Rose's delightful theory of cinema's influence on Picasso and Braque's simultaneous break from Cezanne's spacial reality to a full cubist expression of actual movement and light) and the remarkable "Torment of St Jerome" by a pubescent Michelangelo.

Tadao Ando is an admirer of Louis Kahn the fiery, tragic genius. Fitting in that Ando, a boxer, truck driver and self trained architect is so passionate about every aspect of his work that he would pummel a laborer for tossing a cigarette butt into a concrete-pour at one of his building sites.

For my part I see his conception of The Modern as the physical expression of the nexus of two remarkable literary works - one of history; Andre Malraux's "Voices of Silence" and the other a rich, complex homage to philosophy and the poetry of the expreince of space; Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space."

Malraux gained fame as a French Resistence fighter and, later as brilliant first Minister of Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle. His writings in the 1950's on the founding and nature of committed "museums of art," then a history of scarcely 200 years, discuss the concrete and abstract influences museums have had from their inception on our perceptions of and the very appearance and development of art itself. Prior to the founding of the Louvre pieces in private collections, curiosity cabinets, scattered works in the church or civic art holdings represented independent, semi-solitary evolution of form and style beyond the reach of simultaneous influences. Word of new works and styles, usually far flung and difficult to reach, spread with glacial torpidity through spoken word, sketches, etching reproductions and tour diary descriptions.

To Malraux the most basic role of museums is of simple storehousing. However, museums are also academic politico-aesthetic machines managed and driven by committee, group-think, collective approbation. From their inception they simultaneously gathered together and isolated under-roof otherwise disparate works from varied regions, dates and movements. Thus is created, by virtue of sophistry and spacial association an implied, often non-existent evolutionary continuum. They draw artificial, imaginary connections between commingled works and movements plunked side by side in a tortuous timeline often without actual connections or contemporaneous artists' direct knowledge of each others' work. And further, collection criteria often involving direct manipulation of the style of currently working artists seeking acquisition. A notable example is the once absolute requisite Italianate drama topped with a slathered goop of mastic to make it shine....."not glassy, not classy," was once a strict rule held in long standing at the Louvre, manipulating from the earlest days what "counted" as art.

In "The Voices of Silence" Malraux expands the concept of fixed-structure museums as unnaturally limiting constructs to include a further unnatural expansion into what he calls "museums without walls." These museums without walls exist as a result of the explosion in personal mobility and rapid post-WWII explosion of inexpensive, mass market photo media. That combination's low cost and high production has exposed vast numbers of works, most previously alone, isolated and virtually unknown to the multitudes. It also absolutely alters them by presenting them in print, each of a relatively like-size and scale whether a Babylonian cylinder seal or massive tapestry, fresco, rosary window, canvas or sculpture, all are printed as neat, similar snapshots, usually several to a page. Again, as in the museum WITH walls, suggesting a false association between them within an artificial, limiting construct - flat pages of a book or portfolio. These multiple alterations and miss-associations reinforce the falacious perception of art as an unbroken "genetic," self-aware continuum and, so, further alter and warp the very evolution of intra-museum era and post 18th-21st century art itself. Further mal-association between works and movements is exacerbated by the current turbulent marketing through slick mags, taste-hucksters and turbid, trend-ravening galleries. "What's not sassy's not classy" the art-snob elitists' slogan today. I digress. (No apology)

Now, from Malraux to Gaston Bachelard's elegant, dense "Poetics of Space," a four dimensional exploration of the nature of our personal relationship to places and space itself taking the form of a repeating word-gyre. Similar to The Mahabharata in structure his composition is stated again and again in repeating, expanding word-thought-spirals. Starting again and again from the same point the gyre widens with each retelling adding more depth - space - expanding from the singularity to which each of us gives form and consciousness out to the endless cosmos. Then "Poetics of Space" upon closing, finally, remarkably does so not as book but as literal space of thought.

Bachelard begins his spiral literally from the cradle, the first space our consciousness embraces and from which we first begin to gauge comfort, place and our expanding sense of self, space, home, world, universe. He describes the first childhood house, revisited after decades and upon climbing the stairs again for the first time a particular stair still creaks as ever and immediately evokes a spontaneous wash of instant, intimate familiarity beyond words. These subliminal auto-responses, what he refers to as the daydreams of perception we walk in, are those from which poetry itself arises prior to conscious thought. These endless, interweaving and expanding daydreams are the turning resonances we carry of places, secret spaces, favorite cubby-holes, safety from the storm, of stairs that seem only to climb up to the attic or of those only down to the cellar. The intimate spaces made so by the enclosure they offer holding us safely from the vastness of "beyond." Bachelard posits that we constantly measure ourselves and our place in an ever widening spiral, we live our lives in endlessly turning, richening poetry defined by the daydreams spun by earlier turns of the gyre.

And so the two works - Malruax's and Bachelard's - come together in the vaulting, brilliant, moody intensity of Tada Ando's Modern. Alternately vast, cold and imperious and as small, warm and welcoming as childhood - Bachelard - the museum first stands as warehouse and safekeep to art the very essence of traditional museum with walls - Malraux. Space for work, a somewhat linear presentation of styles, movements and eras. The Modern's collection, rarely playful, slightly grim connected by the umbilicus of Malraux's "here becomes there, thus, this begat that" associations.

The architecture itself is very much in keeping with the pronounced affection the board feels for the wonderful, corrupted, Loki-esque work of Anselm Kiefer, held in multiple pieces by the collection. An exterior almost completely of ground to roof glass and water upon which the whole building seems to drift. Inside, vaulting spaces, a glowing round-walled apse, darkened tiny, dead-end bits of stair disappearing into titanic walls in a grand hall processional staircase of the gods that ascends to the "palace of the blessed art." The only disappointment was the abandonment of the originally planned solid glass roof over all, a sad, but sensible choice in a place where hail like grapefruit can thunder down from an unmannerly sky.

In keeping with my irascibility and iconoclasm I never go up this stairway. I prefer the more beautiful and somewhat threatening "cellar stairs" at the building's north side. There, much narrower stairs. Concrete walls on my left are cool, silken smooth - they, like the entire building were cast in massive moulds of buffed mahogany. On the right is a slender handrail between me and a deep void joining a soaring glass wall, Bachelard's fragile film of thought that seperates me from the danger of the world beyond and the daydream of comfort offered by the high wall I climb beside. The stairs land at the exit - my entrance - to a beautiful little gallery, a holy-of-holies. A vaulted, smallish room of incredible warmth and intimacy, childhoods sanctuary. For all the concrete's cool, hard mass and sharp angularity it is to me a place of happy ascent, a deeply comforting space worthy of solo display of the smallest, most important jewel of art conceivable.

Moving through the next galleries of varied size and configuration - some windowless, some jutting out in the vault of space facing those endless glass walls that overlook the water that the building floats upon, past the somewhat overly somber, mostly joyless and self-serious examples of all the best names of the 20th and 21st centuries we come to my second favorite place. My exit...."down the up staircase."

The stairs are glorious. Wide, grand, tiny niches undercut the walls causing the stairs to disappear, uselessly swallowed by the massive, angled walls above. And, just like the grand hall of the Wizard, there, at the top of the stairs gazing vapidly down on us all is a huge, emerald-city-green self portrait by Andy Warhall. The Wizard of Odd, himself. I always delight in turning my back on his pocked, gaunt, lamb-fleshed face and slowly descend, erasing him from my thoughts with the delicious touch, lust, of the perfect skin of Ando's walls. Finally, passing the glowing apse enclosing Kiefers tender leaden wings, re-entering the blazing, naturally lit great hall I face, far across the hall another Kiefer, his sardonic, taunting "Pope Alexander VI, the Golden Bull.

Fort Worth, as is any city, is often embroiled in the pathetic day to day nit-picking innate to modern city function. However, in the realm of art and its collection, housing and safekeeping for the ages Fort Worth on the prairie is a remarkable, enlightened and rarely equaled nonpareil of foresight, devotion and great worthiness. Go figure, Cowtown the nexus of Bachelard and Malreaux.

PICKLED BULLSHIT

Precisely five centuries ago this year, 1511ce, Michelangelo illuminated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the "Creation of Adam." Also that year brought Raphael's "The School of Athens," Durer's "Small Passion," Titian's "Salome'," the publication of the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius' "De Architectura;" working were da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Bellini, Grunewald, and on ad gloriam.

Almost five hundred years ago, as I've mentioned here before, Veronese painted - and so risked excommunication - a wry, delightfully witty and deeply meaningful "Last Supper." Polemical, intended to stretch the envelope, to comment intelligently on the shabby state of then-modern life and the pathetic shallowness of rich, contemporary aesthetes and fashion-whore bounders he used them to populate the composition presenting a vulgar, contemporary banquet. Too great to reject out of hand he was, nonetheless , placed under Vatican threat of literal damnation and thus compelled to soften the edge of his critique by the semantic slight of hand of changing it's title to "Feast in the House of Levi."

By way of comparison, about 1,500 years earlier the wealthiest of the wealthy, Nero, was sold a single crystal wine glass for what is considered to be the equivalent of one million dollars-US today. The vaporous and vapid who float, stratospheric above we lesser grubby earthbound souls have changed little since either Nero or Veronese. Though all those of wealth are by no means shallow more than ever enjoy inflating their egos with the feted gas of vulgar excess in the art market. Silly piddlings of thought, weak exercises not of art, but art theory are made to seem important only by the outrageousness of their price tags.

Nero's wineglass no longer exists. If it does it is either earthbound or sitting, ignored and unrecognized in some backwater museum on a shelf labeled "glass, Roman, c 100ce" for which the museum likely paid in the range of two or three thousand dollars. It's prior value based solely on a fool with endless means, his absolute belief in his own genius - and a crafty salesman.

Today's art-world Neros are still fiddling - and themselves being well played - while worthy thought burns. Financially tubby intellectually anorexic these art market gasbags float blissfully self-satisfied in the rarified outermost stratosphere of cutting edge "art." These happy, vapid few are constantly on the lookout for something - anything - that can make them appear to have the prominence and intellectual mettle they are absolutely convinced they possess. Petite Neros, they mistake great wealth for great worth and great hucksters for great advisors.

Clambering against each other to occupy the cutting edge, the needle's tip of Kandinsky's metaphoric inexorably rising triangle of spiritual and aesthetic evolution they fail to attend to his caveat that periods of spiritual deadness in art are marked by the overwhelming desire to possess an object of value rather than to experience a work of art's spiritual depth. And so they make smut of art and art of folly.

Imagine now, if you will, the year 2511, five hundred years opposite our current place relative the monumental thought, the humanist genius of the Renaissance. Assuming any of the current crop of art mag fodder survives our society, our common intellect could actually be gauged by crumpled auto bumpers, a single florescent light bulb (then having been changed 1,214 times) glowing numbly at a carefully placed 45 degree angle 3.5" off the floor, the astonishing buffoonery of self portraits in frozen blood and floors painted in vaginal effluent with the artist's head of hair as brush.

There, too, baffling or worse boring our descendants is the utter, cynical folly of a dead baby bull bristling with ever so sinister black painted arrows strategically malleted into it's still-born carcass (the queasy artist would never sully his own karma by actually killing it himself, I mean get real!) and hung from the neck by a wire in a fishtank of formaldehyde. Get it? Why, yes, of course! It's St Sebastian! How frightfully droll ....and only 5.6 million dollars plus 50,000.00 every time it's hauled out for a showing. Fabulous!

I can see it on the museum shelf there in 2511 - half of it precipitated to the bottom of its murky little tank, a card under it "American, c 2011pce, preserved animal specimen, unknown ritual."

Pickled bullshit.

TO HARVEY AND THE OTHERS

Lately I been talking to a young man who was referred to me for mentoring. He is determined to be an artist. We exchange e-mails and chat about the nature of art, about the business of art, online critiques and such. And like so many young and hopeful souls he thinks being an artist must be such a cool lifestyle. He has romantic fantasies of a life without alarm clocks and deadlines, lounging around thinking cool, arty thoughts with cool arty people while waiting for some magical cloud of inspiration to envelope him, like Zeus embracing a new lover disguised as a fog of bliss.

Well, like they say in the musical "That aint it kid, that aint it!"

Inspiration of that sort is a myth. Art is a job. It's a wonderful job, but a job. You get up, you get to the studio and you make art. Dealers push for faster production, galleries ask for enough work for a solo exhibition with six weeks notice, commission deadlines press, charities "hate to ask, but can we have something next week." And the only fog that envelops artists is the same blizzard of envelopes full of bills that everyone everywhere has to plow their way through every month.

I find inspiration, it doesn't find me. I find it in the work-lives of other artists and other masters of their craft and plain folk I've known or see each day. I find it in the old, bent Vietnamese woman who never rides, but daily pushes her ancient bicycle through my neighborhood once west, once east. I take it from a dear friend whose politics, I tease, are sometimes woefully in error but whose goodness and devotion are boundless, who works herself to sickness on behalf of strangers. I take inspiration from a brilliant writer and actor who showed so much of himself, exposed so much of his truth and life that there was finally no possibility of hiding. He was either going to be recognized as an embarrassing fool or embraced as a speaker of depth and honesty, as a genius capering on the razor's edge of human folly and glory. Naturally his work earned the later response. I say it is natural that he was lauded because I believe absolutely in the urgent desire, the insistent hunger of men and women of thought to invariably embrace truth. Whether a truth of thorns and knife-edged broken mirror or of joy and bliss or of silent contemplation, truth in the arts is the hallmark of great work. And sometimes sooner, sometimes later it will always, finally be recognized.

Inspiration is not a drifting cloud or an arbitrary gift. Contrary to Hesiod's devotion it is not a visit from a muse that inspires and fires. Inspiration is searched out, gathered, it is single seeds gleaned from barren stubble fields of experience. Inspiration is the act of bearing witness to the spine and guts of other's who have gone before. It is the willingness to struggle, pleading with paints, or bronze or clay or words and chords until they are coaxed to their highest expression.

I keep a list of people - some famous, some not. I want to show them my work before I die. Not because my work is too wonderful for them to miss seeing, but because their work, their lives and their effect upon me has given me stores of inspiration that continually fuel my days and fire my passion. They inspire me to learn be as boldly honest as they are.

My studio walls are covered with beautiful twigs, sage bundles, strings, interesting crumpled wrappers and threading among them all are scribbled bits of Joni Mitchell's piercingly brilliant turns of phrase. "Now the janitors of Shadowland flick their brooms at me." "Evil is sweet in the mouth."

I love reading and re-reading Chiam Potok's "My Name is Asher Lev." It is a stunningly authentic work by an artist of words about the nature of a young man becoming an artist of imagery. But, what is most impressive to me is the clean, liquid translucency of Potok's prose. There is not a single line that should've been more or less than it is. The flow of the book is maintained by an absolute invisibility of language. Nothing Potok writes gets in the way of the story of Asher Lev. It is without ego and there is nothing of Potok to stumble over. It seems to have been so effortlessly written which suggests to me endless hours of work, of a painful, constant tearing apart and rebuilding of sentences and passages over and over until, finally, there was nothing left of Potok, only the story of Asher Lev remained. It is not the story of Asher that is inspiring to me. The huge struggle of Potok to remove himself from the story is epically inspiring.

Believing a magical cloud of inspiration must first fall upon one to make art is no different than thinking elves can fill the studio in midnight darkness to weave gold into your art. Gather it.

OSTRAKONS AND IMBECILES

Ostrakon is the Greek word for a shard of broken pottery. The Athenians would write on them the name of someone who had become unacceptable - sometimes by simply being too full of themselves (museums are chock-a-block with ostraka bearing the name "Pericles") but most often for individuals advocating actions that threatened the well-being of the state. If their name was scratched into a majority of the ostraka they were summarily expelled from Athens for a period of years. They were ostracized. Rejected.

Today short of murder, rape - or, of course being dark-skinned - we find few acts of sedition, treason, few incitements of attacks on humanity so singularly unacceptable as to justify ostracism. We have dressed ourselves in a mangy "who among us has not sinned" relativism that allows for virtually any degree of incitement to brutality. We even find droll amusement in watching dull-witted publicity whores broadcast pictures of political foes with sniper crosshairs imposed upon them. We roll our eyes as they wink and smile shouting "Hey, you becha. Don't retreat, reload!" to salivating mobs at public gatherings that are just half a-step from lynching parties. Some of them pretend thoughtful moderation by furrowing their brows and using phrases like "may require 2nd Amendment solutions" to negate legal election outcomes they find unacceptable.

Quite simply they advocate armed insurrection. They actually, absolutely suggest the slaughtering of philosophical or political opponents and the violent overthrow of a justly elected government or aspect thereof. And from the rest of us - hardly a murmur of dismay, let alone broad, flat condemnation and a vehement demand that these subhuman goons be rejected, labeled seditious, made outcasts.

Alaskan imbeciles, clowns, lunatics and borderline sociopaths are treated as if they may, gosh darn it, have a valid point. Or that they at least deserve a "respectful hearing" without the undue intrusion of being "refudiated'"(sic) by harsh questioning by some subversive, elitist, ivy-league media pawn.

And, so, this afternoon a decent young woman, a congresswoman serving her country, Gabrielle Giffords, listening to the needs and hurts of her constituents in difficult days, has been shot in the head. One of her staff members was killed. A nine year old little girl is dead. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court is dead. Three other people are dead and with them 12 more people shot.

She wasn't conservative enough. The others were just in the way.

This is not an isolated incident. Nor can it be dismissed as the random act of a lone loon. This is the natural outcome of the nexus between frequently published, persistent insistence that violence against those who differ politically or socially is now a righteous act and of otherwise conscious, decent people's mewling failure to reject and ostracize the feral, noisome vermin who advocate such madness - in society at large OR in your own circle of friends.

For artists, the chroniclers of and witnesses to their times, it is imperative that we include, in text or subtext, as an aspect of at least some of our work an unequivocal rejection of this era's slovenly devolution of human social intercourse and commerce. If we can not ostracize them and actually remove them from among us we can certainly ostracize them for all of art history.

Artists, first and last, cannot fail to scratch the names of the brutish and seditious into the ostraka of our record of the age.