with Justin Heazlewood
Art and civilisation has been parting ways for some time now. Music is wallpaper. Films are screen fillers. Paintings are quirky dream farts that make no sense. Poetry is what a tagline would look like if it had a nervous breakdown.
It feels like art is dead and that feeling is important to me. It’s a manifesto philosophy that helps me make sense of the world; a trend I’ve been observing for ten years or so. Sure, art is getting made, but does the modern world really need it? Musicians I know have existential crises each time they release an album. A CD used to feel like an occasion – now it’s a collection of digital files, uploaded to the thick, dark cloud.
Carrie Brownstein, writing for NPR in 2009, observed how the context of artist intention was being demoted:
“As exciting, democratising and demystifying as a more global and decentralised music industry is, this bottomless sonic stew also means that we’ve largely divorced artists from place, history and physicality.”
My D – I – V – O – R – C – E became final today.
The typographical ecosystem of lyrics, credits and cover art which sustained all three dimensions of a record has been dismantled by technology in the name of convenience. Meanwhile, the market value of songs, movies, books and local theatre shows has plummeted. ‘Everything is free now’ sang Gillian Welch in 2001.
With humans, the market value tends to dictate the emotional value. The value of art as an ingredient of society has been depreciated. When was the last time you heard about arts funding in a minister’s budget? (Or felt it missing?)
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if doesn’t pay
Artists not making money is nothing new. Artists feeling indifference from the commercial world is as old as the (Lauryn) hills. Hopefully it’s not just the middle age of experience talking, but … something feels different. Shop signs used to be hand-painted by a signwriter, now they are digitally printed with iStock images. Hotels used to hang up paintings, now the trend is hyper-real photos of iconic cities. The words ‘relax’ and ‘laugh’ carved out of wood. Some sort of anti-abstract mantra for a consumer cult. A straight line for a treeless inner world.
The wellness industry is exploding. The ‘experience’ industry is where it’s at. People frequent beer festivals the way they used to see bands. A punter is furious if their favourite tipple is no longer deemed ‘independent.’ If their favourite artist paired with a brand, it would barely ruffle a beard hair. ‘Food is the new rock ‘n’ roll,’ I sang as The Bedroom Philosopher in 2015. Idiocracy by Mike Judge is coming to pass.
Art is dead.
Let’s face it.
It looks beautiful, still.
That doesn’t mean it’s not being made. I just put out an independent book, with glee. The fact there are still bookshops feels like an exotic miracle. But then I see a twelve-year-old perfecting the art of walking and scrolling. I know that they have Minecraft and Tik-Tok and YouTube and infinity everything, more or less, and I see a sprightly, precious attention span being stunted like growth – along with the context for artistic expression; flattened, smoothed and spat out portrait ratio to be enjoyed on tiny speakers up the back of a bus.
Memes are not art. Podcasts are not art. Tattoos are not art.
Art feeds imagination. It restores boundaries. It ignites dreams. Art matters. It’s the truth of humanity. It’s the closest reflection of our inner selves. Sitting with a CD pouring over the lyrics isn’t just a nineties nostalgia demo, it’s an example of fans in a sweet spot with music (and technology for that matter). Humans are susceptible to the sin of gluttony. The soundtrack to our lives was never meant to be an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Going to the cinema. Sitting up late to finish a book. Talking about a shared TV show at school. They may seem trite, but I believe in there somewhere, art was the glue mending the fabric of society. Holding us together, stopping our egos from flying away into space, or disappearing into the black hole of our savage laziness.
Justin’s new book Dream Burnie is available from Paperchain Bookstore or via dreamburnie.com. His 2014 book about artists in Australia is called Funemployed.