In the end, there are two roads. One is of hate and despair and fear and mockery. The other is of love and hope and courage and affirmation of the world around you. The fork in the road has always been right in front of you. And the choice has always been yours and yours alone.

Addendum I (November 22, 2000)

As art is inseparable from our lives, and ever more so, the choice facing us holds for art, as well. Why is art ever less separable from life? Because it is all that remains to us after the collapse of religion and even philosophy, the last stages in the development of the spirit, as Hegel would have put it. The long-neglected edifice has begun crumbling around us before reaching its pinnacle, and art has temporarily found itself on the top floor, as it were. One way is up, toward light, the other is down, into darkness. The choice is in front of us—artists. The choice is ours and ours alone.

Addendum II (November 23, 2000)

Giuseppe Mastruzzo responded yesterday morning within an hour of my sending this piece to the “Let’s Make Art!” electronic-mail list. I was so busy the whole day yesterday that this is my first opportunity to return to his message. Here it is in its entirety:

As you know, “in the end” I agree to the fork-in-the-road issue. And, as you know, I often associate hate with fear and mockery with despair. It is difficult to have courage, because courage (love and hope, and the affirmation of the world around you) is about the renunciation of the present self. Hence the question: How to make art an instrument of renunciation of the present self, as it has been true, some times, of religion?

As Giuseppe knows, I am very much in agreement with him. He has introduced the theme broached here in his talk at the First Hereford Salon Symposium in the summer of 1997, which was subsequently published as a book with a revealing title: Who is Art?[1] In it, Giuseppe is calling for “an art which does not look for its author’s glory.”[2]

I should add here that the 1997 Symposium explored the proposition that art as we know it is primarily an illusion of freedom, rather than an activity that in any sense contributes to freedom. As Goran Đorđević argued a couple of decades ago, “the problem is not how art ought to be, but how to transcend it as a form of consciousness and of human activity.”[3] But how is art to be transcended? How is this illusion about freedom to be dispelled? These questions are still open, but Giuseppe’s is the first step in the right direction.

Addendum III (September 25, 2015)

As I wrote to the editor of Flash Art a couple of years ago, making oneself is the only meaningful purpose of art (“Making Oneself: From a Letter to Giancarlo Politi,” May 26, 2013). This is very much in tune with yoga, which is squarely about making oneself, as well (“The Art of Making Oneself,” December 20, 2013). Luckily, the fork in the road is way behind me by now. And art is so inseparable from my life at his juncture, that it rarely crosses my mind any longer.

Footnotes

1. London: Hereford Salon, 1997.

2. Op. cit., p. 18.

3. From Lutz Becker’s Film Notes No. 1, Student Cultural Center, Belgrade, 1975.