Divination

Flaubert once said, “Art is not reality.” I understand him to mean that art is never meant to provide answers, rather he believed it to be discovery. Art is discovery? I lean more towards defining art as sentient; in this word construction that means if it is discovery, it is discovery of itself; unable to be contained by physics, it bursts forth. Gail Sher states, “Artists are always anarchists.” Citing Pissarro who pleads, “It is freedom to impose on oneself one’s own law, one’s own regulations or limitations, one’s own pictorial reflection, and one’s own process of selection. This is,strictly speaking, the definition of autonomy (giving oneself one’s own law)—a concept absolutely central to anarchy.” Yet, perhaps freedom exists in accepting reality as the eternity of question after question after question after question…

In this moment we are poised to ask a new question: What is art in the age of rupture? What is straining to become, despite the artist’s attempt at control?

Can we create our way to a fresh revelation: a miracle?

Let’s let our inklings be our guides. We are all in this together.