We now live in a world of ever intensifying contraries that has many similarities to the 1930’s which ended in WWII. These contradictions are in the very weave of the fabric of Global Capitalism and its financial, economic, medical, educational, residential, cultural and artistic and ecological, etc, areas of life. Everything is moving towards a war with itself in new areas of what might be called an epic ‘no mans land.’ All the Catch 22’s are like arrows flying at the heart of the vast system that is breaking down at increasingly concentrated degrees.
Artists, writers and cultural workers are bedazzled and baffled by the whole process of fragmentation, and each attempts to find their own answers to the estrangement that this these impediments inflict.
I have tried to search for a creative new synthesis in my art that finds a new track through the obstacles of the above dilemmas.
This chronicle in progress of mine has been consistently concerned with finding pathways around these problems broadly outlined above.
This whole question of contraries needs extensive research and is important.
Recently, the Queen of England wrote to the London School of Economics(soon to have its funding slashed) and asked them why they had not for seen the coming financial crisis, which had begun with the collapse of Leyman Brothers, after some time the School of Economics replied that it was the result of a ‘failure of the collective consciousness’.
This is interesting and underlines my point at the beginning of this text. This false reading by collective consciousness is a result of a failure of the enculturalisation process.
The paradigm of this late Capitalist culture of has been one of lies, waste, escapism; approximation and make- believe that suited powerful elites and consumers alike.
Nearly everyone in the culture was looking in the wrong direction and was being rewarded for it as they possessed the false ideological tools, which couldn’t recognise that something big was happening.
Quintessentially the whole cultural, financial, political, a social system could not call reality by its right name.
This enculturalisation process is wide. From popular culture of consumerism to the esoteric elitism of the Post Modernism, from the mass media manipulators to the entertainment industries. From educational institutions to the expensive advertising machinery and so on.
The whole culture has been living with false consciousness.
No one foresaw the crash coming which will now be have is adverse effects pushed onto the back of everyday people, who are already battling. This constitutes an epic and awesome failure of the whole Capitalist and so called Liberal/ Democratic culture of the post WW11 world.
But, if we know the main causes, then with time, we can change them.
Artists and writers have to learn from Brecht and others, as we have to show in art and culture ‘the pleasure of the possibilities of change in all things.’
That, in all its complexity has to be the aesthetic big picture for post capitalist globalisation for Art and Culture in the Age of Major Transition. (ACAMT).
