Dear bloggers,
As many of you know, my mantra is “Peace tolerance understanding hope and love.” I want to talk a little bit about hope. Hope is individualistic, as is despair, although in socieities, there can be despair and hope, but actually it’s all made up of individual choices. There isn’t a general hope or general despair. The world would be a very dismal place if we didn’t have hope.
How does that interact with the art world? I think it depends on what we’re individually looking for in the art world. I know for me, when I first started thinking about art, what I liked, what I didn’t understand, I thought there was a vast amount of what I categorized as “bullshit art.” Then I started to think more about it and, in comparison with the reality of I hope, I realized I could come to an understanding of what this artist was trying to say.
So that instance of hope was a hope to challenge myself to cast off my prejudices about abstract art. The older I get, the more acceptance I get, and the smaller is the container that holds what I used to call “bullshit art.” In most cases anymore, I have to scrape the bottom of the barrrel to find it—not because anything else has changed, but because I have changed. And the main reason I have changed is that I hoped I would be able to grow. I thank God I wasn’t complacent in my prejudices, my lack of knowledge, and my seeing-but-not-understanding.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think hope is, too.
Thanks for all your questions—and we’ll all keep hoping...
Matt