According to mainstream Western thinking we’ve evolved to new heights of thinking; we are at the summit of thought and no other previous age can compare. The thinking goes – we’re constantly instruments, eradicating diseases and increasing the longevity of human lives – we must be the bees knees; we must be at our apex. But I couldn’t disagree more. I am a man of the arts; a humanist who’d rather have no technology and a good book than the latest gadget. I know to the lovers of Apple, Wall Street bankers and all those that are slaves to the latest fad that I am worthless. I can’t do differential equations; I can’t engineer something; I don’t know what a credit default swap is and I could almost care less about the ‘newest’ pharmaceutical to hit the market. To them, I deserve to earn minimum age – while they eat their caviar and deign to tell the rest of us how to live. No, I am a man of letters. I read Machiavelli and recite Dante. I wish I could write like Virginia Wolf and I emulate Yukio Mishima. I am in awe of Da Vanci and a lover of Botticelli; and I am a devote of Verdi and interested in learning more about Pergolesi. What happened to these great thinkers? How have we become so devoid of true artistic and creative genius? We’ve beat it out of people so much that all we are left with is Koons and we think he could actually compare with Michelangelo or Monet? Of course, I partially blame the American university system for this; although they aren’t in a vacuum and the English and
Germans are also at fault. If I had to hear the greatness of one more German or English thinker while I was in undergrad, I would have poked my eye out. To these professors – the same ones that perpetuate this myth of science above all – the Italians contributed too). To them, art is nothing. That’s not true – for investment purposes it’s something. And by art, I only mean modern art which I detest and think worse than art – it subtracts from art, it is art’s antithesis and worthy of all scorn and repudiation. I can barely even stand to be in its presence.
then it’s worthless. Case in point, John Ruskin (the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, and prominent social thinker and philanthropist) wrote: “English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.” It’s sad and so typically neat picture of what it should be. must dispose of this restrictive way of thinking. We must throw of these vestiges of WASP thought and we must embrace the arts – not some facsimile form of it. We must fund the arts, we must live in it; we must respect it. And most importantly, we must treat it on an equal footing as other professions and not belittle it for not
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