Quote of the Day

Posted July 25, 2009 at 11:55 AM

http://exurbanleague.com/2009/07/25/quote-of-the-day.aspx?ref=rss

"The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men."

• Ayn Rand

I am not a big Rand fan: I find her work too self-centered and devoid of human emotion for my tastes, although I do understand and sympathize with many of her goals.

But she's spot-on with quote, especially when it comes to art. As much as I love art that comes from the slow destruction of created things (that's my photo above), art that is built from the ground up and built towards a specific goal is so much more satisfying to both the artist and audience. Art today isn't about building something up, because nothing in today's society is worth the effort, and the artist knows this. We are not suffering from a lack of talent, we are suffering from a lack of purpose, a lack of why. Man has lost his place at the head of nature, nature itself is unsuitable because it shows fallen state of man, and the higher ideals of beauty and truth have been empty shells for quite some time. The best art can aspire to today is a mocking, snarky criticism of art itself.

Art that glorifies a higher purpose must have a higher purpose to imitate, and since God died sometime around the turn of the last century (which came as quite the shock to Him, I imagine, being everlasting and omnipotent and all that), artists have found that nothing fits the God-shaped hole in the world.

Something that artists share with the rest of society. Art truly does imitate life.