art...

As I walk around this city, I find it very difficult to find truly moving art. It saddens me that slowly our artists are disappearing. Well, they aren’t really disappearing, but they are taking the bigger money and the comfortable lifestyle in exchange for supplying bland, uncompromising, unchallenging art. This sell-out attitude is sickening and socially disturbing! Artists are the minority of people who ‘see’ and are able to ‘tell’. We are allowed more freedom of expression than most because it’s ‘art’, yet we squander our opportunities to spread this vision. Surely we have a moral obligation to effect change? To use our scripts, columns, music, voices, brushes, pencils, cameras, our very movements and energy to at least try to do something about all this social injustice around us must be a given? It is vitally important at the moment that we speak out due to the corporate handcuffs placed on most intelligent journalists and the pure stupidity of the other alleged journalists. It’s not just the global issues either, which are horrific, but we must start at home. It’s New Labour, and their attempts to steal our liberty from under our noses, through the guise of protection. Their community support officers, ID cards, ninety days imprisonment for suspicion – not conviction – of terrorist activities… Has anyone heard of Big Brother? This is an Orwellian nightmare come true. So where are the artists’ protests? Does anyone care anymore?! Then we have issues such as religious hatred, racial hatred, mental illness, gang violence, sexual discrimination, age discrimination, just to name a few. The problem with most of these things is that people misunderstand what the others beliefs really are and are not educated responsibly by the media. The headlines from most of our papers only fuel these misunderstandings. We have much more of an uphill struggle due to the fact that most of our papers are built around celebrity and sensationalism rather than honesty and education of the masses. The young people and children of our society walk past our newsagents every day on their way to school and are influenced by these small-minded and unintelligent headlines. We have to spend time understanding these things. I feel we need to use our varied passions to help educate the young and the old. If we can make people see through the eyes of those with differing opinions it would surely have an affect on them. I understand people want success and money too, but surely we can dedicate part of our time to working on things that help soften these tensions and make us a more progressive nation. Is ‘art’ now only about money and status? Have artists now become post modern jokes on what artists should be? The problem is that we’ve missed the joke… This is now the status quo for ‘artistes’… I’ve got no problem with them being the self indulgent, self obsessed, pretty people of Shoreditch and the West End if they are creating controversial, and politically charged pieces of ART that make people think. To make the public think about SOMETHING surely must be the essential component of everything we create! The thing is unless we are careful, we will be sat in these places in 30 years time and everyone will still be having the same conversations, and we will look out the window and IT will be gone – OUR CHANCE - our chance to say something. We will have failed to affect anything but our health. I’m all for having a good time, but lets not that be the focus, but the success of our work be the reason for celebration! You may say, ‘It’s too far gone! There is nothing we can do now!’ I say that apathy is the reason we are in this terrible position now, and if we want our children to have any future at all, then we must start caring now! Maybe I’m a dreamer, but unless we can see a future, then what does that leave us to live for?