os181005 Kicking the art habit 

It’s one of life's luxuries to be habituated to the arts that are designed to disengage people from a society of responsibility to Earth’s human and other life forms’ sustainability.

I have the icky feeling most of the art world people I’ve been associated with for fifty years behave like those alien duplicators in The Body Snatchers.

“The duplicates live only five years and cannot sexually reproduce; consequently, if unstopped, they will quickly turn Earth into a dead planet and move on to the next world. One of the duplicate invaders claims this is what humans do — use up resources, wipe out indigenous populations, and destroy ecosystems in the name of survival.” (Wikipedia)

When the United States becomes a nation populated by indifferent people glued to their mobile devices, walking zombie-like past homeless people and dumb to the corrupted government, I think it’s a nation terrified people whose minds have been snatched away. They look away.

My old associates, with few exceptions, carry on their middle-class lives as if they are blessed with royal status, needing nothing but attendance to their next light show or arty party. Their responses to the world’s other nations chagrin over the USA government policy and its increasing friendliness to the enemies of freedom are not as important as their kitty videos, fashion and foibles.

It’s the hardest thing, at my age of 76, to kick the old tired habits of responding to, for example, an invitation to a home art show by a couple of my former students. All that is promising about the image represented is its darkness, which suggests they may be awareness on this artist’s part of the times we’re living in.

Yet, he is indifferent to me, one of his former teachers. I have moved on, but he – like most of the art students of the past century - never left school. They are a reflection of what happened to the institution in the 1980’s – freeze-dried in place and bound by the conventions of the past.

There would be no continuing education and no future for intellectual, liberal arts and scientific exchanges. None of those so-called art professionals would be required to keep up with the times like so many engineers and scientists whose credibility depends on global networks of peer reviews.

Their select status and approval by the rich and politically powerful would maintain for them a comfortable, even luxurious lifestyle. They would never need to support or even talk to an independent researcher and producer like me. They only keep my name on their computer database.

My independence in the old days at the UW helped them with their own unique approach to success in the art world, but when I continued to explore the relation of the arts to science, technology, engineering, math and reading, they dropped me the same as the college banned me from teaching. I am no longer useful to them.

This relationship is mutual. I am grateful because – as it has always been - I continue to learn. Continuous learning, lifetime learning, includes learning from the proof of success and of failure of artists to be part of efforts toward work for Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

Seeing their failure, I will continue a course that is unlike my former students’ – not use up resources, wipe out indigenous populations, and destroy ecosystems in the name of survival – so I will not attend any more art events. Only STEAMR matters now.