Canvas and Dirt

We are busy / life moves fast.  To experience art we search our media sources, color corrected, volume increased, compositionally correct with angle and light we gaze into 60 megahertz of vibrating LED and imagine what it could be like.  We rely on these sources to express ourselves, propose research ideas and visual accomplishments, and to jury and grade others.  Walter Benjamin would suggest that we are experiencing only a slight aura of the art we want to understand, more than one degree from its original state, our mind imagines the complexities of truth. 

A facsimile of time and place, art being made by a human surrounded by humans making art.  We move our studios and our styles, our approaches and change our genres over time.  I mean, we are generation X, right?  We will forever be searching for our center, our place in this natural world, but like Picasso we will only imagine the feeling of the "noble savage" carving away at his (or her) ritual mask.  And again we move on.  We move on to Mylar, to pigment prints, to Photoshop, to acid-free materials, to digital prints and place our MP3's on Vimeo for the world to find and be fulfilled.  We move.  We make.  We share.  We design.  We re-evaluate. We look around us for trends...

Some will be great and some will make great money.  Some will travel on their expense account and some will be happy with their new yoga sensei.  Some will return to the dirt while others become holograms in the ether.  Like Walter Benajamin suggested, time is a whirlwind of events, no top or bottom, beginning or end, just movement.