Art Objects, Karma & Toolkits

In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now. Art Objects..., Jeannette Winterston (p11)

...The calling of the artist, in any medium, is to make it new. I do not mean that in new work the past is repudiated; quite the opposite, the past is reclaimed...This is not ancestor worship, it is the lineage of art.

The true artist is after the problem. The false artist wants it solved... (p12)

The audience, who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and livelihood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making... (p13)

..In order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting...True art when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are...falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love andpart of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment....Are we happy with all this tameness? Are you? (p15)

The media ransacks the arts, its images, in its adverts, in its copy, in its jingles, in its little tunes and journalist's jargon, it continually offers up faint shadows of the form and invention of real music, real paintings, real words. All of us are subject to this bombardment, which both deadens our sensibilities and makes us fear what is not instant, approachable, consumable.

The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, and effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so unreasonable to expect a percentage of that from us in return? (p16)

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. (p20)

Who thinks, if they borrow virtual money, and in invest it in virtual funds, that they can then buy a real house? Tomasz Pietrowokowski, Karma and the Path of Meditation