Art and reality

Question turned ritual:

If what we take as factual is our personal reality, and we revise its form to our liking, where is the truth ?

Ritual question but worrying as ever. Providers of alternative realities besiege us. All of them want to tape us. Execrable scandals, hideous cruelties, push us towards magnificent revolts, idealized worlds. The true becomes invisible, already, because it is too banal. Banality of good and evil.

All amateur taggers

Then we will happily paint our inner realities with the bombs obligingly provided by influencers. Euphoric news market where everyone consumes and produces. The share price of news has never declined.

The true becomes an instantiation of reality, one among the multitude. Version a little stingy. The realist looks like a miser, with his refusal to embellish. He recalls this rigid math teacher who wanted to make everyone find the same solution of an equation. What a bore! Put all his neurons in formation squared while they have so much fun twirling in all directions…

Enter Tartarus

But there are two ways to get closer to the real. If the scientist seems too military to us, the other is radically the opposite. It spreads out every imaginable phantasmagoria, beyond our personal inventions. I named art, of course. Art is a collective human enterprise, which surrounds our realities with a universe inconceivably reworked, tortured, enchanted.

Presenting art in the form of collectivism is unusual, but it is the construction of the Pandemonium of Humanity that individual artists are busy. Each of us stands before this limbo or this demonic Tartarus, depending on the mood that presided over the work. You have to dare to go inside.

What’s going on, then? Do I feel lost? Does my compass panic in the face of these outrageous cross-dressings, exacerbating or simplifying reality? Surely. But I put myself for a moment in the place of the work, which awaits my reaction. It sees me looking for safe ground. The awareness of excess, of the purified ideal, is the best gauge of my personal reality. Was it a little unbalanced? I refocus it. The evidence of the false brings me back to the true.

Art is fundamentally healthy

The evidence can be shocking. Remember ‘Our body‘ in 2008, the terribly controversial exhibition of 17 dissected human corpses. Unhealthy art? To think like this is not to understand its role. It is to believe that it must adorn the real, to highlight it. But what if there is no universal truth? If we can only surround it? So we need a cloud of caricatures to push us back to his invisible heart. The more obvious the caricature, the more effectively it pushes.

Art displeases the one who believe he is camping on the truth. Unwavering, solipsistic personal reality. Any buffoon who wants to dislodge him deserves to have his ears pulled. The most sensitive subject is ethics. We want ours unquestionable, but how can we verify it without questioners?

This is not the only paradox of art, which needs the insanity of a few to keep other minds healthy. But art, as a process, is fundamentally healthy. It is even the natural guardian of our mental balance. Far from the prison of psychotropics, artificial chains of thought.

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