I was one of the few artists to have predicted and prophesised both the 9/11 crisis and the Capitalist financial catastrophe and the massive economic collapse of Wall St, which occurred at the end of 2008 this has become the worst economic collapse since the 193O’s Over $50 trillion dollars has been wiped off the stock markets around the world and there could be more losses to come. US alone have lost 25% of GDP. This amount of money isn’t just an anonymous number, but the residue of people’s intellectual and physical labour over generations. The future effects of such loss, excess, greed and waste, via total laissez faire global capitalism, will be felt in the next few decades and beyond on the cultural, as well as economic and social fronts and elsewhere.
The US debt is now a staggering $15 trillion which is one fifth of the entire planets wealth.
The Recent left wing critics in the US have pointed out that the amount of finance that has been lost and stolen is coming from the taxpayers pocket (above $3,000 billion) to bail out the banks and financial institutions, which caused the crisis and it could have been used 'to pay off every problematic morgage in the US' as well as' build a brand new home' for every North American.
That is the humongus scale of the deformative crisis now unfolding.
It is absurd. It is a world standing on its head. It must be changed.
We are now in the middle of what Italians in the crisis of the late 16thC Renaissance called ‘la tempesta' or of being overwhelmed by fate in the shape of a huge storm. This whole present period with its problematic origins contain unusual and complex cultural attitudes to crisis by artists, writers and cultural workers, etc.
There is now a malignant cancer eating away at global Capitalism. It is of a recurring and systemic character, with the expanding crisis is coming directly from the US, which is now at the centre, rather than the periphery of the economic and financial problemsof this malevolent maelstrom.
In my painting of ‘The Coming Financial Tsunami 2000’ (Fig 1) I started to attempt to name these above preoccupations.
In this art work and also ‘The Political Ship of Fools’ 2007 (see below. Fig 2;), there is in the former painting of a gigantic, gargantuan wave, a scene, which shows sympathetically millions of tiny desperate people caught up in the financial collapse of capitalism. Revealing not only how far seeing an authentic artist can function, but also, how I could move between hybrid artistic styles from both Eastern and Western cultures. Articulating and naming with penetrating insight, areas where few Western artists have feared to tread. On the middle left of Fig 1; one can see huge skyscrapers collapsing with ominous presence painted long before 9/11.
There is something very wrong if a culture cannot anticipate and name its main problems if it is totally preoccupied with cultural diversions it will not know itself very well, on neither the inside nor the outside of its culture. It will stagger like a dumb and blinded giant toward greater danger.
Culture and Art function like counter- worlds or bridges between humanities inner fantasy world of collective and individual imagination and its outer goals; it is a site where these emerging challenges are sought, asked, and answered.
