Marcel Duchamps: Fountain.

DIY Hermits
The Perils of Engagement,
the Rewards of Disengagement

Anger at Art
Ever since Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring caused a riot and Duchamps’ Fountain unleashed conceptual art on an non-comprehending world, anger and derision have been common responses to high-level creativity.

Such responses have come both from the masses ("My child can draw better than that") and the elite (often discomfited by attacks on its falsely safe shell of "beauty").

Princes object to modern architecture, politicians object to the demeaning of religious icons, courts object to theaters full of naked bodies, legislators object to music full of naked language, critics object to ugly. Decadence! Sacrilege! Subversion! The charge, even, of treason is invoked.

How easy it is in the midst of a knee-jerk reaction to forget, or fail to see, that among its many other functions, art is always, always, a kind of thermometer stuck up the ass of culture, taking the temperature of the body politic.

Whatever else, art is saying here’s how comity is doing this week, this year, this decade, this century.

Altogether, such noisiness in response to the latest temperature-taking is only yet another human circus whose performers have mistaken the messenger for the message. Or, if you will, the thermometer for the sickness.

Ugly art lately? Yep. Lots of it.

The question of course is not how to delete the ugly art, or how to denigrate it, but why ugly art at all, and why so much of it and for such a long period of time.

The bearers of this bad news—the artists—aren’t doing it for money, or fame (at least not initially). Yet they persist:

"This," they keep saying, "I perceive, and I can do no other."

Some get attention, mounting even, eventually, to fame, and with it money. Most do not. Yet the generations have kept coming for a hundred years with the same ugly message: There is sickness here, and it seems to be getting worse.

Thomas Kinkade: A Holidy Gathering.

Even those who believe they opt for the beautiful yang of this ugly yin—think Thomas Kinkade—fall unwittingly into the trap of beauty so exquisitely and unremittingly dense that its effect is not finally soothing but, upon contemplation, solely and very efficiently, emetic. It makes you want to throw up.

But they’re all telling us the same thing in many different ways: Something is really, really wrong.

Beyond the Ostrich
Anger and derision, outward and visible signs of unreasoning fear, are not that far from the behavior of the ostrich. If I just stick my head in the sand, I won’t be able to see the threat, which means it no longer exists. I’ll hide here in my esthetics, my religion, my political ideology, my science, my philosophy, and everything will be, if not O.K., at least tolerable.

Surely we are capable of acting more intelligently than ostriches.

Once, if you were convinced of the evils of civilization, you could get thee to a nunnery or a monastery and hide out there (after making certain promises). For the truly independent of mind, there was always the wilderness. Hair-shirted, you headed to the nearest desert or mountaintop and sat for a good long while.

There’s actually a lot, still, to be said for such removal of self from immersion in the Great Multiplexing Cacophony a.k.a. Civilization.

Nowadays, it turns out, there’s an easier way. No hair-shirt necessary, no self-scourging, no staring at the sun.

No, all that’s required of the contemporary do-it-yourself hermit is a simple click: Off goes the TV.

Off it goes, and it stays off.

Sure, such a media-less life doesn’t have the simple purity of that experienced by the desert-centered solitude-monger. But, you will find, it is shockingly efficient and effective.

You doubt it? Of course you, the skilled swimmer in the pixel pool, doubt it. You can’t imagine such a life. How to fill the emptiness of mind if the incessant sounds and images of fast-cut news and entertainment are removed?

How indeed.

You'll be astonished, after a certain period filled with pangs of withdrawal, at how unnecessary all that visual and aural non-information is. You'll also be astonished at your own newly rich inner life, as quite vast resources and abilities you'd forgotten you have germinate, slowly at first like timid plants after a hard winter, and then grow and flourish in the sun of your newly found time and attention.

We see so much that we are blind; we hear so much that we are deaf.