ARTISTS/LIFEISTS

ARTISTS/LIFEISTS

1. Sometimes trauma or beauty or ecstasy or oppression make people want to make art. These people are called artists.

  2. Sometimes they live with or spend time with or are influenced by others who are called lifeists because they say that what they are doing is not art but life.

3. Lifeists choose not to make art of their marvelous happenings or imaginings or traumas.

  4. Sometimes when artists take vacations from being artists and spend time with lifeists they might not really feel at home because they are hiding their art-selves. Other times they are happy to be with lifeists so that they can drop their art and pay attention to life alone. This might seem frivolous but it isn't. Often it is as nice as art.

5. Sometimes lifeists make believe that they are artists and want to be on art-like,imitative of performances, reality T.V. shows. A few of these shows are: CHAINS OF LOVE BIG BROTHER TEMPTATION ISLAND TOM GREEN SHOW MANHUNT THE AMAZING RACE FEAR FACTOR SURVIVORS THE MOLE JACKASS etc

. 6.Sometimes artists look at these shows and remind the lifeists that what they are doing is not shamanistic enough, not sensitive enough, not informed aesthetically enough, not theoretical enough, not ironical enough, not culturally based enough. Artist then feel proud to be smart and better than lifeists. This is not good life or art to feel proud.

7.Sometimes lifeists accuse artists of hypocrocisy and artists then feel guilty, knowing that maybe they really wanted fame and that was as frivolous a motive as the lifeists desire for alot of money from being a TV star, which is a lifeists dream of happiness.

8. Sometimes the artists get addicted to spectacle, voyeuristic content, and uncurtailed homoerotic narcissism.

9.Sometimes lifeists dress like artists or buy homes where the artists live.

10. Then often something large and levelling and devestating and terrorizing and humbling happens and it is like an atom bomb, or a Holocaust, or a genocide, or a rape , or a repression , or an Inquisition, or a Crusade, or economic genocide, or sexual betrayal, or bodies falling from the skies, and then,.....sometimes everything stops ...and for awhile there is only life. Then for a short time, everyone in the whole, wide world, for a short, short time, becomes a really , really true artist of life because of death. And the whole wide, wide, wide world breathes together one silent breath and maybe the wheel begins to turn again. Here?

  October 2001