Sermon on the Mount
After a long spell of fretting over the mounting legal assaults on porn, I wrote this “Mega Rant” in the hopes it would inspire a new way of thinking among colleagues and friends.
Perhaps the message will resonate outside the pornography industry.
THE GIST: The combination of pornography and the Internet could save our Civilization.
Sermon on the Mount
I am beginning to understand how the Digital Technologies of the last half-century have been transforming Us.
It is an old cliche that art imitates life. But you know what they say about cliches, especially old ones.
More accurate, I think, is to say that Art and Life aspire to each other — an effort that is necessarily painful for both, because neither can ever look the other in the face.
Feeling exhausted from that perspective myself recently, I turned away from that which had held me fixated for so long and strove to a distance. I highly recommend doing this, if you can make some time for it. From such remove, I was able to appreciate a very-long-term trend, an essential shift that I believe has been happening in only tiny increments, over hundred of years.
Obviously, I was interested in studying the effects of Art beyond just my own life. There seemed, the more I thought about it, a connection to our present circumstances, vis-a-vis pornography.
From a distance, it was clear to me just how true that cliche has proven.
Throughout history, the Art we have produced, whether simple or baroque, has been a reflection of the people we have been. In our art, it is possible to discern not only who we are, but our circumstances, our concerns, the mundane, and most especially — our dreams. Art performs a function. Artists, I’m going to assert, are literally the “dreamers” of our culture. Through their work, they give rise to “coded dreams” that we can all look at (as when we awaken in the morning). We can make use of those visions — which will be at times nightmarish, at times beautiful — as windows to otherwise unavailable insights into ourselves. Art offered us nothing less than a bridge to Alternative Experience
That was true for a long time, but I don’t think it’s true anymore.
I’m going to construct a hypothesis for how I think this lapse in the functioning of Art as Alternative Experience Bridge has brought us to the current crisis. By crisis, I mean to describe the systematized, institutionalized suppression of individual sexuality, both outwardly, via everything from outright criminalization, to the more subtle development of taboos and norms which are enforced socially, to the tragic internal psychology of the sexual “misfit”.
I’m suggesting that Art, in its essential usefulness as bridge to Alternative Experience, had stopped working for us in the way it once did. I’m suggesting that the loss of Alternative Experience has had a terrible effect on us during the last century, even as we have been frantically seeking a suitable replacement.
Let’s consider that.
To say that Art is a bridge to Alternative Experience, is really to say that art bridges people to each other. This can be a bridge between a dead painter and an art student looking at one of his works in a gallery. It can also be a bridge between dissimilar cultures, with little common ground for dialogue owing to their differences. It stands to reason, then, that the usefulness of art, if you will, to a person or a culture is a function of, or is at least influenced by, that person’s or that culture’s variety and degree of socialization. In a nutshell, the more disenfranchised the individual from his society, the more critical the role of Art in his or her life. Likewise, the culture that finds itself alienated, for whatever reasons, from the larger macro-society comprising all the Earth’s cultures, is much more reliant on the exchange of Art with other cultures, if it is to have any exchange whatsoever.
It is an understandable misconception to believe that Art becomes more operative when relations between sides are more friendly. The truth is that Art, for being generally, aspirational, pretty, conceptual, vague and non-literal, is a fairly safe way for the sides to connect. It helps, too, that works of Art works can travel unescorted to places where representatives from that culture would never go or be unwelcome.
And such it was for a very long time that different cultures of earth, separated by great distances, might know nothing of the other, but for the appearance of the occasional mask or other odd artifact among some arriving ship’s bric-a-brac. Our modern day romantic notions of foreign travel, the connotation of the word “exotic”, for example, are based on thousands of years of having to stretch the imagination to think about other parts of the world.
About 100 years ago, things began to change — quickly. At the end of the 19th Century, Freud and the advent of wire-based communications technologies brought a sense of instantaneity, fleetingness and greater personal subjectivity to the human experience than at any other moment in human history. Before then, I believe, people imagined others living in far-away places of the world as either very similar to themselves, or, otherwise, as so dissimilar as to be able to completely disavow their existence in Abstraction. Art was, therefore, quite free to serve us in all the ways we needed it to, because there was little to contradict it in the form of actual information from Other Places. But, when a degree of “remote verification” became possible by way of transformative new communications technologies and faster modes of transportation, it became more difficult to indulge our fantasies of Alternative Experience.
At the same time it was becoming more popular to think of the Mind as the “maker of a personal reality” instead of as “the perceiver of a shared reality”.
100 years ago, the effect to Art was the unleashing of a bold diversity of expression that reflected both the Terror of being alone and the Power of being alone. Psychoanalysis and the thinkers, philosophers, writers and artists it inspired, bestowed unprecedented power on the Individual, by telling everyone, basically — “It’s all in your head.”
This trend continued aggressively for 100 years. And art was an important catalyst. By the 1960’s, so many people all over the world had simply stopped trying to measure their thoughts against pre-existing standards, that the Liberals (those people prepared to live with questions, and make things up as they went along) and the Conservatives (those people for whom happiness required participating in Vested Systems of Behavior) had come into violent conflict.
Though it was occasionally relieved by episodes of collective tragedy and collective xenophobic/nationalistic revelry, the tension never really went away. Instead, the Human Horror it had become impossible to deny (for it being everywhere in pictures and films made by photojournalists who traveled to those places where Horror happened) became internalized in us. The devaluation of human life bred cynicism and Existential Boredom in the Haves, and despair in the Have-nots.
The feeling of global connectedness initially fostered by “broadcast communications technologies” was displaced by a feeling of isolation. As television programs and commercials came to dominate the collective sensory experience of the Advanced Nations, it became easier to pretend that nothing which came to us via Television was real. Art, in response, was overrun by Synthetics and Surrogates of all types, which, even from the greatest of artists producing at that time, did little more than stir a vague, introspective melancholy. Had this trend continued, we might today be living in a world pervaded by Selfish Apathy, instead of Xenophobic Paranoia.
But something happened in the early 1990’s that simply changed Everything. All of you know what I am talking about. So let’s just say that the desire to remotely access “tools” and “resources” ended up connecting all of Us to each other.
Able to ignore the hypnotic lure of Television for the first time since its introduction 40 years before, more and more of our time was given over to computer monitors. By way of the Web browser, the power of experiential self-determination came to millions of people who had never dreamt of such a thing. Suddenly, exploration and discovery could happen at any moment. Whatever the physical circumstances of the User — whether a paraplegic senior citizen living alone on Prince Edward Island or a Somalian orphan — if they had Internet access, they could be a bona-fide Participant in the Biggest Thing Ever.
I think most of us who’ve been online for a long time have forgotten just how much we got practically overnight, practically for free. It says a lot that we take it for granted now, and never dare to think what our lives would be like without it. But, it’s never been easy to see oneself from up-close.
So, what has become of Art on a planet now overrun by a Network? Are we closer together, or farther apart? Has virtual connectedness increased our feelings of empathy towards other people, or has it reduced them to mere pixels on our screens? Where is Art? Where are we seeking our Dreams?
We’re forced now to consider what it means to connect with someone. Since the advent of photography 150 years ago, we’ve been staring vacuously at other “people” in print and on screens, and learning that they are NOT really “there” in the only way 100,000 prior years of human experience had taught us matters. It used to be that a person had to be in the same room, or at least likely to be in the same room with you, in order to stir you or stimulate you or threaten you. But that is obviously not the case anymore. We are learning to build relationships that are important to us, that fully engage our emotions, our spirit, even though there has not been, may never be a physical meeting. How did that happen? How did it happen so quickly?
It can only be that we have migrated so essential an aspect of ourselves into so strange a place and so strange a form, so quickly, BECAUSE IT FEELS REALLY, REALLY GOOD.
Whether we want to admit it or not, at some point in our development as a civilization, Art began to fail us. Perhaps this happened simply because Art became inaccessible to most people — either because it was locked up in museums or because it had become irrelevant to us, though it “hung” everywhere.
It’s clear that something was starving in us, and that the Online Revolution that began only a decade ago, somehow, provided that essential nourishment we’d been wanting for.
If you’ve ever read Sigmund Freud, you know that he believed that Sex is everywhere and in everything, that it gives urgent motivation — a vital animus — to all that we do. If you believe that is true, and I think it is — though I broaden “Sex” to include many things not immediately associated with sex — you can begin to guess why Art was failing and why the Internet SAVED us.
The Starvation I am speaking of has been worsening for so long that there isn’t a person alive today who could say they’ve noticed it — however long they’ve been alive. We’re talking about something happening over hundreds of years, in very small increments. As our civilization developed, as our societies grew larger and more complex, individuals began to lose their bridges to Alternative Experience — bridges they had once sought out in Art.
Now, I am going to suggest something to all of you that is extremely controversial, but also extremely powerful. I hope you will be more excited by the power than daunted by the controversy.
I know many of you have an inferiority complex, as professionals — perhaps even as people. It’s hard as hell to work in this business, under the constant barrage of judgment and condemnation we suffer without getting a chipped shoulder. We are frowned upon from so many directions, never see the service we provide to our customers characterized in a positive light, never hear from our customers how happy we make them — unfortunately — because our society condemns their consumption almost as harshly as it condemns our production. At the end of the day, we have only each other to turn to for understanding and approval. You think there is any equivalent to GFY in the clothing business, or the medical profession or among shoe retailers? Of course not — those industries haven’t been forced into the kind of cohesion we have for being as oppressed as we have been. I tell you, it is that cohesion which is our greatest strength. But we have been persecuted so long and held apart so long, we are almost at a breaking point. We desperately need a new idea, a new way to see ourselves, an answer we can give with pride when a PTA member asks us what we do for a living.
My suggestion is this:
WE ARE ARTISTS. WE ARE THE SAVIORS OF A CIVILIZATION THAT WAS HEADED OFF THE CLIFF. WE RECOGNIZED (OR FELT, ANYWAY) THAT THE CONVERGENCE OF THE INTERNET AND “FANTASY FODDER” COULD RESTORE A LOST JOY TO A STARVING, ARTLESS PEOPLE.
I think we have been too ashamed of how much money we make, too afraid of those who would take it from us under the false pretense of protecting the mythological victim we are told we’re responsible for injuring, too afraid to stand up and assert positive things about ourselves and what we do.
We have been defensive and insecure — but that must STOP IMMEDIATELY.
Times change. Definitions change. Standards change. Lately, whenever we hear those words, we brace for bad news. But I say NO! If an “artist” can put a pile of dog shit on a coffee table and call it Art, we can sure as hell make an argument for what we have to offer the lonely bus driver who comes home at the end of a long and fucked up day to get himself a little Alternative Experience.
The definition of Art, and in it, the assertion of our most undeniable right to offer what we offer, lay NOT in the way it is offered, but in the EFFECT.
We provide something necessary, something good, something we should be thanked for.
The truth of that begins in how we feel about ourselves. I am so grateful to this community, to this incredible “place” we come to with such - dare I say it — hopefulness every day. We argue, we laugh, we appall, we celebrate, we share — in short — we LIVE on GFY, in a manner never possible before this moment in history.
Clearly, it is possible to derive something essential while staring at a screen. We know it. Our customers know it. Even those who oppress and condemn us know it. I know it. All that remains is for all of you to feel and believe the truth of that, and to radiate it wherever you go.
The First Amendment has long given idealism and righteous vitality to our cause. But lately, it seems just a shield we’re hiding behind.
We’re acting like a bunch of loophole-whores, looking to beat a murder rap with an insanity plea.
You think that doesn’t send a message, you think that doesn’t smell like fear and criminality to those who do nothing but bide their time and plot and seek allies against us, wherever they might come from?
DON’T BE AFRAID. WE ARE RIGHT.
jack mardack
kunst | art | internet | sociology | pornography | psychology | government | censorship | future | mardack | civilization
October 5th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
[…] Art performs a function. Artists, I’m going to assert, are literally the “dreamers” of our culture. Through their work, they give rise to “coded dreams” that we can all look at (as when we awaken in the morning). We can make use of those visions — which will be at times nightmarish, at times beautiful — as windows to otherwise unavailable insights into ourselves. Art offered us nothing less than a bridge to Alternative Experience… @ […]