Art: The Real Truth.

Why Everybody’s an Artist and Everything’s Art.

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When I think of the pros and cons of what Facebook’s use is to me, I realize I’ve made it do the same bidding that I require of pretty much everything else in my life: to be my forum and my canvas and the wall upon which for a moment I affix my framed – oh fuck, I’ll just call it what it never wants to be called but probably grudgingly would have to admit in some dimension or other it is – “art.” Actually the world isn’t just the place I put my art. The world IS my art. Or anyway is after I’ve had my way with those parts of its body my lusts compel me to tart up or rearrange to my liking.

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I don’t think I’m any different in this from anybody else. It suggests a commonplace truth about perception. We don’t ‘see’ anything until our perceptual apparatuses make sense of it: which means we don’t see anything until we decide what it is.

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We’re always making up what we perceive. It’s how we’re constructed. Is this a priori “art”? I think so. That is, I don’t know what distinguishes any product of perception from another categorically: how we feel and what we think and our modes of expressing it interiorly or out there in the world require exactly what any art requires: 1) assessment 2) identification 3) sorting out its emphases (focusing on what we like and ignoring what we don’t) 4) ‘seeing’ (choosing to see) color and shadow and light and composition in whatever the way the brain directs us to see it 5) expressing it in words we choose to describe a finally indescribable (ineffable) reality. “Reality” can never be described, certainly not ‘objectively’ and only imperfectly ‘subjectively’: we can’t put an equals sign between experience and any word we may want to stand for it.

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Art is just what human beings have to do if they’re sentient. It’s like breathing.

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What about an audience? Oh, an audience is everything, everyone we see – i.e., everyone, everything we ‘make.’
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