What is an artist?
Ive been pondering that all these years...my...entire life, in fact.
Art is my life. So Ive been wondering...What is it?
It isnt a voice, or an image, or a performance. It is a spectacle that unfolds in a single ring.
A world apart, only found within its own universe creating a supernova of wonder beyond thoughts, marvel beyond words, and mystery far far beyond the void. People fly, animals speak, the sky unfurls and creates worlds that are not worlds by any definition....because art is beyond definition...It is an escape from reality.
The Paradox of reality and unreality...the audience can forget reality and journey into a dreamworld. And their guides into that unworld are us, the artists. Those who can pass between reality and unreality. That is what it means to be an artist.
...So if you let go of the string and you cannot find your way back then what are you....when you fall from the string swinging you back you cannot fly. You simply die
.
But what is death in an unworld?
...
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Although these ideas seem somewhat paradoxical because as artists, we tend to hunger to glorify pain and indulge in evil. But since art is otherworldly and a marriage of purity and filth, asylum and risk, mystery and wisdom, insanity and understanding, escapism and realism, numbness and exasperated sensibility makes the artist a mixture of a supernova and a void...a living dead paradox...of both contradiction and mutuality.
...This is what it means to know...to feel conflict and resolution in the same moment for reasons that you just cannot quite tell (but you also can) if they are within your understanding. Knowledge is the greatest form of divinity...because only humans struggle with contradiction so once you travel beyond that point in any form of development and find a flow of chaotic peace one becomes more than human...an artist.
....So of course this is seen as madness, as treason, as sin...its being measured by earthly standards.
