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To: IDontLikeToPayTaxes

A few months ago, I spoke with a friend who is a successful artist (contemporary paintings), with galleries in New York and California, and successful exhibitions elsewhere. He described in detail how the ten most successful contemporary artists in the world are devoted to an anti-art, anti-Enlightenment agenda. Their method is to insist that "art is whatever I say it is," and there is a significant audience of wealthy people who are willing to pay exorbitant prices for items that discerning individuals would term "junk." Even though the artists depend upon artistic ideals to define their life work, their objective is to pull those artistic ideals down around them. They want to destroy the Enlightenment and all that has flowed from it, so that we return to the Dark Ages. How is that for what GHWB called "the vision thing?"


39 posted on 03/27/2007 5:18:38 PM PDT by n-tres-ted (Remember November!)
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To: n-tres-ted
Even though the artists depend upon artistic ideals to define their life work, their objective is to pull those artistic ideals down around them.

That stems from the belief that everything is relative. If there are a handful of really great artists to whom nobody else can compare, then that means almost everyone, even those who would seek to learn from those artists, is inferior. But if that handful of great artists were destroyed, then everyone else would be much better by comparison.

The same relativism applies to certain moral issues like abortion. If someone has had an abortion and is feeling guilty about it, liberal moral relativism would suggest that the way to erase that guilt is to promote abortion so that many more people have one. In that way, one will no longer be worse than everyone else. Of course, trying to clear a healthy conscience in that way will never work--it will merely exacerbate the guilt--but the increasing guilt will lead to increasing desperation to get everyone to the same level.

The real turning point, IMHO, would be to wake up some people (those who have had abortions would be very good for this) to the fact that the way to clear one's conscience after having done something bad is to recognize that it was bad, and why it was bad, and to discourage others from following in one's footsteps. The message "Don't do as I did" is not hypocritical when delivered by someone who regrets his actions. If women who have had abortions were to start waking up to this, there could be a sea change on the issue that would wipe out the Democrats in only a few years.

69 posted on 04/01/2007 4:03:42 PM PDT by supercat (Sony delenda est.)
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