on art

"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401961_pf.html"

No, art is not instrumental. Art is the bloody point. Art is not so that we can work harder, shit better, poke the other ape in the eye harder, art is for its own sake, art is what lifts us above animate tubes separating a mouth-hole from an anus with a drive to reproduce; that is what separates us from animals: the ability to SUBLIMATE.

What do you remember in the end, when you hear that fly buzz before you die, that "blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz"? You remember the moments of art, the moments of transcendence beyond the daily grind... whether abstract, or whether attached to instinctually appealing actions like eating or fucking - it's not the wet in-out-in-out that we remember, in the end, but that connection to creation.

And art is the father of spirituality, isn't it? Our ideas conceive of form, and yet that form inevitably disappoints, never quite embodies that original spark of imagination, so that we wonder: where does that spark live? What would happen if it did arrive perfectly made into the world? Art doesn't happen in a museum, not even in a painter's studio, not even in the space between pencil and paper; those are incidentals, faint traceries around the swirling whirlwind
of art that lives in every human moment.

How does art serve life? How dare you even pose the question? Rather ask how your life serves your art.