Problem of Communication

It's a problem of communication. Bertolt Brecht paved the way for an artwork with politcal meaning. I appreciate the beauty in a painting or a song or a book just as quickly as the next person, but I'm tiring of it. How long can this beauty thing be played out for?

I think it is time to stop looking for the beauty in artwork (and by artwork I mean, all levels of creation, writing, composing music, writing lyrics, political action, painting, sculpture, performance, etc.) and begin looking for the poetry in the artwork. Am I splitting hairs? Absolutely not. The defintion of poetry is the art of idealizing in thought and in expression. If we look for the poetry in the artwork, we begin asking ourselves a long list of questions. Its historical relevance, its level of intrigue, it's application. James Joyce says in Portrait of an Artist, and I'll paraphrase, that artists go through three stages in their artwork. First, the artwork is about themselves. Next the artwork is about themselves as they relate to the world, and then the artwork transcends to the poetic platue of being about the world. It is then fully applicable on a much broader scale. Paintings are too often relevant to painters. If they became relevant to the world, they'd become poetic rather than beautiful. Does this mean politics exclusively? Absolutley not. If an artwork is poetic, it is thought provoking. If the lyrics to a song are poetic, they are thought provoking. Only then does it produce the fractal geometric responses in it's audience. We need to thirst for an artwork that we can not put down. An artwork that goes through the entire cylce of digestion, becoming at first a bolus in our minds where we chew it thoroughly, seperating the vitamins from the fatty ingredients which are integral to our livelihood, and then staying with us, throughout the entire digestive process. We are then using the artwork for our own nutrition.

A search for the beauty alone produces the perastaltic reaction, where we begin to digest the food, find the beauty, and then regurgitate the artwork before it has been fully digested, leaving it in a pile of bile in the bowl that Duchamp has signed and we have deemed as beautiful. It leaves us alone. This is a terrible place for artwork.