Fidelity

The thought that now begins to occupy me concerns the question of how art advertises life here and now. Because our culture has met up with nihilism again in an old form—the form of religious renunciation of life and its happiness—there is a need to revisit the meaning of religion.

Religious narratives of history and being seem to follow the Romantic notion of a lost Eden of Joy, which reappears after death. This literal interpretation is a mistaken hope. What seems more likely is that human perception begins in a form of bliss, matures into a drama of conflicts and ends in an armistice of hope. All of these can be seen as worthwhile stages of life, and it is the celebration of this life to which they add their intimations of immortality. Eden and Heaven are here and now. One can live in them or Hell, as the Buddhist reminds us. And it is in the conscious choice to live fulfilled lives of civilization, cultivation and enjoyment that make immortality present. The ancient Greeks would even consider such people to have become like gods, implying by that the notion of true living.

It is in this sense of art as an advertisement for life that we can make sense of all the partial efforts of consumer advertising, of pop art and op art and expressionism, of abstraction, surrealism and realism, of impressionism or the Baroque or the Renaissance. What the consumer is always being promised—taste, beauty, style, wit—are tools for the ages-old consolations and celebrations of life. Except as they promise to substitute buying for living, they contribute to the herd instinct which is looking for something called happiness. Be it found at the remove of a vacation purchased via Southwest Air or at a restaurant table for two at an expensive venue, it finally comes to the thing for which art has always been creating access—from cuisine to couture to truth and beauty. Art is a means to bring us close to life, but life is in the living of it. Henry Miller essentially said the same. Living and happiness are what the fuss is all about, even to the point that a person can find happiness in truth or the beauty of difficult things.

Experience in art is also less material, by the very nature of art’s simulacrum, by its reduction or abstraction of the world into a two-dimensional vision prepared for the cave of the retina and the deeper cave of consciousness, itself. This has some effect in making art nearer to spiritual ideals, and less the material world it reflects or uses. Because it operates on our sensation so directly, it is tantamount to thoughts and dreams. These are the fields of immortal reflections, the constancy of principles, the repeatable experiment. We hold truth to be self-evident, so also art. It is there or not. We may hold the higher consciousness of ourselves and the world in our hands and not perceive it in a contemporary artwork. It may be there or we may mistake it to be there. Later in life we may understand it all as what our time needed to see. It is a message from the light of day—a Platonic ideal of the Mediterranean climate. The shared vision, the shared meal, the climate whose temperature and pleasure makes people feel intimate with themselves, each other, the day itself, the sun. All of this keeps calling us to live as best we can in the interval allowed us on earth.