Art and the Homeless

René Descartes, in the “First Meditation,” of his Meditations On First Philosophy (1641), has this to say about painters and philosophy: “For, as a matter of fact, painters, even when they study with the greatest skill to represent sirens and satyrs by forms the most strange and extraordinary, cannot give them natures which are entirely new, but merely make a certain medley of the members of different animals; or if their imagination is extravagant enough to invent something so novel that nothing similar has ever before been seen, and that then their work represents a thing purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is certain all the same that the colors of which this is composed are necessarily real. And for the same reason, although these general things, to wit, [a body], eyes, a head, hands, and such like, may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true; and of these j...

If you've ever dialed 911 on a Saturday night you know that what the dispatcher wants to know is (if it is not a medical emergency); 1. are guns (weapons), or 2. open liquor (alcohol), involved? If neither of the above, your call will be transferred, where you may wait until daybreak for an answer.  The social consequences of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are so dire, as to require a federal department to monitor commerce in these dangerous substances alone. If we learned one thing from Prohibition, it is that they cannot be eliminated -not by legislation, anyway. And yet, they are the basic ingredients of violent crime. As a college student, the representation of violence - as opposed to the real thing - was a topic of philosophical debate. "Drama," as everyone knows, is common speech used to disparage personal issues as irrelevant. The opposing point of view, then, rallied around the question "when does drama cross the line of actual, actionable, criminal violenc...

When I first read Sartre's Being and Nothingness I was perplexed. After attending his play No Exit I was not. It is all about freedom -or not being free. What I looked for from Sartre was a rational explanation of the phenomenon of Modern Art. What I came away with was an understanding of the Human Condition in the 20th Century. It's all about making tough choices -or not choosing. No one but a strict formalist would deny that what is distinctive about Modern Art is the human, all too human, condition of the artist. As incidental, circumstantial, and material, as the artist's condition is to his art, like the proverbial elephant in the sacristy, it is hard to ignore. Since Vincent van Gogh, the artist's (any artist's) mental health is a factor in his (and every artist's) artwork's assessment.  Since Vincent, the artist's condition has expanded to include more than mental health. My own art is concerned with homelessness, another state-of-being of the hu...