I wonder sometimes, does it bother you when I post so many things in one night? I tend to binge-post on this site. And I worry about it damaging my credibility.

Do you wonder at all, if I'm serious about this? I mean, I really am serious about this, but I wonder if you think I'm just making it up.

Well, I am sort of just making it up. This really is what I'm thinking at any given moment. That's sort of what I try to do here. I just talk about what I'm thinking about. Just write it all out then do some minimal editing for clarity and spelling. And sometimes not even that.

Evan gets annoyed when I start talking about artists and art. He hates the whole idea that such things might exist, this class of people who are different from non-artists and class of things that are differnt from non-art. Or maybe he doesn't, I don't know. We've had the discussion a million times.

The whole conception of 'an artist' as any specific type of person is ridiculous, he might say. (and I'm speculating wildly here--we don't talk about this much anymore 'cause the whole idea sort of annoys him... but I would encourage him to participate in this discussion online--if he even reads this page ever--'cause at least here it has some purpose--I mean, you're reading it, right?--whereas in our day-to-day life it just sort of gets us both frustrated with each other, and no-one else can benefit.)

Anyway, so yeah, he doesn't like it when I try to generalize about artists. I think it's my scientific upbringing--my father's an engineer--so I sort of take the standpoint of "well, there are things called artists, so lets look at them and try to figure out what the common elements are and lets see if we can't draw some conclusions."

I suppose to do this properly, I'd have to launch some enormous scientific study, I'd have to go out and meet a thousand artists, or ten thousand. I'd have to ask them questions and mark their answers down. I should subject them to electrical shocks and measure their response in physically identifiable terms. I guess my own personal experience of the artists I've met and the people I know who are involved in the arts are unreliable.

But see, that sounds an awful lot like science to me. And I thought one of the purposes of art is to sort of break free from that whole approach to examing the world. Or at least to act as a counter-balance. To get away from the rigourous, metric divisions of science and to use the intuitive, emotional side of things to explain our human condition a little bit better.

I think people believe that art is here to make the world more beautiful, or to help us understand it better. I don't know if they believe that, but I think they do.

But if you're going to ask me what I think--not what I think other people think--I guess, at this one moment, I'd say that I think art is here to help us look at the rest of the world and see beauty. The art doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful. After all, sometimes counter-point is the best way to emphasize a melody.

But I should come away from what I look at, and I should find something in it that helps me make sense of the rest of my life.

I've always felt a little bit isolated from what you might call the 'art' community, because for the most part I find it's engaged in self-important navel-gazing. Ohhh look at us, we're aware of the medium. But the medium is the art, so if the art is focussed on the art, what the hell good is it to the rest of us people?

It's like politics, sure everyone's supposed to be serving the public good, but there really is no public good, so you help out the people who vote for you and hope it's good enough.

Maybe, my problem is that I believe in 'shoulds' that I think there are some things in this world which are better than others. But then, so does everyone. I mean even the people who think that nothing is better than anything else think that the idea that 'nothing is better than anything else' is better than the idea that "some things are better than others."

So yeah, I'm a prick, I think I know more about these things even than the people who know more about them than me. But at least I know that.

I don't make art in weird little places and talk about things that no-one understands and then pretend that everyone can relate to my experience.

I did for a while, maybe, while I was on drugs, but you know, now that I've stopped taking the drugs, a lot of the bullshit that I thought was just part of the trip, has stayed with me, and upon sober reflection seems still right.

A lot of it was still wrong, of course, but that's true of anything. There are wrong and right parts.

Let me say, though, unequivocably: The current ways of doing things will soon be dead, just as the old ways are dead. Art, like everything else in nature works in cycles. I think this bubble will burst.

I think that someday soon there will be new unities and new rules, like there were in France back in tha' day. It's happened several times in the past, there's no reason to expect it won't happen again.

Of course, what I *really* think is that the American empire is headed into a long, slow decline that will probably result in something pretty similar to what happened in Europe after the fall of the roman empire. I could provide details if I had read more, but I'm pretty sure that it was the dark ages. Don't quote me on that. Quote me on something interesting like sex or drugs or rock and roll. No-one digs history anymore.

I don't really believe that I know very much about all this. But people out there do. I guess what I want to do is show people that its possible to be an artist without studying art. And without being an asshole about it. In fact, it's possible to be an artist without even making good art.

That's the world we live in, now, where there is no definition of art, except any definition which you can make everyone else believe. I mean, if anything can be art, why isn't everything art? Why do we still have things called art? Shouldn't we just forget about creating art and just perform critical analyses of everything around us?

One of the best ideas I've had in the past little while is using a dream dictionary to interpret images from everyday life. Look around your living space and find out what the symbols mean. We have a christmas tree, which represents gifts and positive thoughts, there's a bit of a old car, car crashes represent failure, so I think it's interesting we've incorporated failure into our world, its necessary for success. there's lots of good stuff. Someday I'll do alonger post on that.

Warhol showed us that the artist doesn't need to have any thoughts. He/she needs to know the right people, he/she needs to wear the right clothes, he/she needs to seem exactly like an artist should. He/she should also be much much smarter than anyone who asks a question about the art. And then, whenever someone asks a question, the artist should treat them with absolute contempt for ever thinking that anyone in this world can communicate an idea.

Communication is a silly idea, I mean, when you look at a painting, then it's whatever you see that's there, man, unless, like you're not trained enough to actuallt recognize it. Or I guess not. Or I guess so. Or both of those things. Yeah man, attain doublethink and you're halfway there. Or you're all the way there. Or you're no there at all.

I guess the difference between Zen and modern art theory is that Zen lets you figure out that it's all bullshit by yourself, and modern art theory teaches you that it's all bullshit.

Well, either way...

-Trevor

P.S. My big idea right now is that Evan and I are both right at the same time, and that the answer lies not in our finding an answer, but in sharing our continued search and frustration through a dialogue on this website. Marx had his Engels, and Costello had his Abbot. It's the way of the world. Yin/Yang and all that. But then, I don't really know what he thinks about this. I'm sure it would take years to find out, and that's why I want to get started soon.

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