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Book Categories |
List of Illustrations | ix | |
Foreword | xiii | |
Artist's Prayer | 1 | |
1. | Vision and Mission | 3 |
2. | To See or Not to See | 33 |
3. | Deeply Seeing | 71 |
4. | The Mystic Eye | 109 |
5. | Illuminating Visions | 139 |
6. | Art of Goodwill | 177 |
7. | Art as Spiritual Practice | 205 |
Afterword | 234 | |
Notes | 243 | |
Acknowledgments | 249 | |
Index | 251 |
Title: Mission of Art
Shambhala Publications
Item Number: 9781570625459
Publication Date: March 2001
Number: 1
Product Description: Mission of Art
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9781570625459
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9781570625459
Rating: 5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/54/59/9781570625459.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Ross Smith
reviewed Mission of Art on December 24, 2018[updated with s'more quotes, sorry for any typos] Incredibly inspired and inspiring, and more timely than ever. I started typing some of my favorite passages below, but there are too many to include them all. Alex Grey offers a beautiful and richly woven perspective on art, being, humanity, and the world which insists upon the belief that nihilism is no way to live life.
"Today's culture of high rationality has been dubbed postmodern, because we have deconstructed reason and language itself, finding that there are always multiple points of view on any subject. Any attempt to comprehend a "whole" or "higher" truth must take the cacophony of individuals, each with his or her own opinion, his or her own "truth," into account. This fragmented, multiperspectival climate has lead some thinkers to the conclusion that there can be no linguistic basis for truth at all. Postmodern doubt has replaced the confident trajectory of invention and progress which characterized modernism. European and American (mostly male) artists dominated modern art, favoring and reinforcing a belief in their self-importance. An overemphasis on ego-driven artworks has lead to a culture of narcissistic spectacle and nihilist fragmentation. Yet because postmodern pluralism embraces so many maverick points of view it can help generate tolerance toward cultural difference. This is an important step toward a more global understanding and renewal of art.
The current cultural situation is calling for individuals to transcend the fractured vision of postmodernism and awaken to some transpersonal and collective spiritual basis for truth and conscience. At this transitional time it is inevitable that artists will reflect regressions into romantic mythic fantasies and nihilist nightmares. Yet can we use the wisdom gained from each stage of consciousness and artistic epoch and transfigure our minds and our art into a new integral vision, honoring the truths of both objective and subjective worlds, and save the planet while we're at it?" (15)
"Yet the mission of art cannot be limited or strictly defined with words. It is much as Lao-tzu said of the Tao, "the way" of enlightened wisdom: The Tao that can be put into words is not the real Tao, not the ultimate eternal Tao. The artist's mission may not ever be reduced to words or rationally understood, but its invisible magnetizing presence will infuse an artist's work completely. … For each culture, artworks come to embody and communicate insights that help to interpret life and take action in the world." (10)
"We all organize and interpret life according to a unique psychological filter or lens, our worldview. This psychological context, the way he hold the realities of life, including who we think we are, mostly goes unnoticed. Our mind and body use it somewhat automatically. In order to notice our own worldview, we have to think about the way we think; we have to rise above our habitual thought patterns and notice that they are habits. We have to question who we think we are. This happens only when our worldview is sufficiently challenged, when new visions collide with and unsettle our existing vision of life. If the challenge is great enough, our worldview and sense of self will dissolve and either regress, break down, or transform to a higher and deeper vision. Art history is a record of such breakdowns and breakthroughs." (10)
"For most adults, reason dictates a level of behavioral conformity within a social group and adoption of common beliefs. For most artists, this means using the conventional approaches of the art world of their culture. Certain individuals evolve beyond the group mind; they excel and develop their own special vision of life. Development of the individual artist can both recapitulate and foretell the evolution of art. An original artistic vision is both acquired from the surrounding culture and attained through a depth of personal experience and introspection. When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen, and potentially transform the consciousness of their community." (8)
"Art and the Evolution of Consciousness
Art spans human history, from prelinguistic cave dweller to postmodern city dweller, and stands as witness to an ongoing creative process, an evolution of worldviews, a historic unfolding vision of nature, humanity, cosmos, and consciousness itself. Every work of art embodies the vision of its creator and reveals a facet of the collective mind. Artists offer the world the pain and beauty of their soul as a gift to open the eyes of and heal the collective." (8)
"Art seems to be a spark of the eternal coalesced with a distinct historic moment, driving artists to do something that witnesses their depth, that expresses their most personal and universal insights. … They somehow make their mark, and their art asks us to open our senses and take in the world anew, to experience and appreciate the full range of life in all its terror and glory, its strangeness and beauty. Art helps us to maintain our creative excitement about life, and at its best, art can inspire and transform us. the mission of art advances as individual artists express their culture's view of the world, in a personally hewn collective vision." (9)
"Scientific reasoning and the subduing of nature have occupied the Western mind for the past few centuries to the point of our current amazing technological conveniences and alarming ecodevastation. Modern materialism has been a destructive ideological force hidden in the Trojan horse of orthodox science. Scientific orthodoxy and the materialist worldview propose that the entire universe and the miraculous biodiversity of our natural world are the result of a series of accidents. The materialist view would state, further, that consciousness is a by-product of the brain, and that when a person dies there is no soul, spirit, or afterlife. In short, the subjective inner experience of meaning is devalued or eliminated. Altered states of consciousness are considered pathological, and primary focus is placed on manipulations of the phenomenal world. An attitude of materialism shuts off a person's intuition, by which the spiritual world is apprehended, because spirituality is labeled as a delusional belief or dangerous hallucination." (35)
"Some popular art reflects the spiritually blind zeitgeist of alienated egoism, souless materialism, moral degradation, violence, and the extremes of artistic absolutism. But I have come to accept even "negative" art as a "positive" gesture because it harnesses the creative fire and describes an aspect, even if an ignorant or vile one, of human character. Some art that appears sick may be a diagnostic tool for social ills." (53)
"Art and Nihilism
Good leads people toward living spirit and compassionate action. Evil leads people away from life, away from spirit, away from kind and wise action, toward fear, confusion, and emotional and physical violence. A strange form of evil has infected the soul of humanity in the twentieth century, and it bears the name nihilism. Nihilism is the belief that all existence is meaningless and there is no possibility of truth. Nihilism is the hopeless darkness of the spiritually blind. Nihilism blinds us to the interdependence of all beings and concern for their common good. Nihilism leads to greed and sexual predation, and in corporate boardrooms can lead to rape of the environment. Nihilism leads to transgressive and criminal behavior, cynically disregarding the possibility of loving-kindness and heroic action. Nihilism is the attitude of egoic paranoia and amorality that makes murder justifiable. And nihilism has become one of the premier attitudes displayed in popular culture." (53-4)
"The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick has recently stated that the derangement of mystical experience might be explained by a "theotoxin" (God-poison) in the brain. Freud hoped that his psychoanalytic clients would reach a state of functional neurosis. Is this the best we can hope for? What are the higher capacities of human awareness? The field of transpersonal psychology has been mapping these possibilities for several decades now." (59)
"By confining itself only to what can be measured with instruments, the materialist point of view becomes a metaphysical flatland allowing no subjective insight into why we are here. Scientists and artists need not limit themselves to such a view. No less a scientific genius than Albert Einstein professed a profound respect for mysticism and the importance of imagination:
The most beautiful and most profound emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms' this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illuminable superior who reveals himself in the slightest details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction for the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.11" (59-60)
"Seeing is also the recognition of meaning.
"No wonder that once the art of seeing is lost, Meaning is lost, and all life seems ever more meaningless: "They know not what they do, for they do not see what they look at." 'Frederick Franck" (73)
"Meaning in art is the transmission and reception of symbolic density. Meaning is only possible when a relationship is drawn between two separate subjects. … The function of the conceptual mind is to isolate and distinguish one thing from another…" (104-5)
"The conceptual mind constructs a coded world of meaning by assigning names to things and then comparing them. The everyday functioning of civilizations is completely dependent on the powers of the conceptual mind and its coded world. The downside is that by creating a world of isolated distinct objects, the conceptual mind creates a mental trap of limits and opposites, distinguishing our isolated self from everything else. The ego is the construction of this intellectual self-distinction. The conceptual mind creates a seductively logical prison of words that only spiritual insight can cure by transcending." (105)
"The mystic artist guides us to an oasis of spiritual truth and clarity within the postmodern desert of false and shrill media information saturating our consciousness. By contemplating a beautiful work of sacred art, one may momentarily remember the silent center of mystery that is our very soul." (132-3)
"The light of truth beyond external appearances is what artists evoke in their finest works. Here we come to the conjunction of the three harmonies of idealism: beauty, truth, and the good. By absorption into the beauty of sacred art, a person may sense the presence of higher truth and its inherent goodness. Beauty is the visible doorway, the seductive gift of transcendental presence. Beauty is the radiance of spirit." (148-9)
"Cyberspace luminous forms created on computer screens, seen in such far-out special-effects films as Altered States, Brainstorm, Lawnmower Man, and Contact, are some of the closest visual analogs to subtle visionary heaven and hell realms. It's part of the allure and the glamorous aura of these computer worlds. Fractal geometry, visualized in infinite detail on the computer screen, has been adored and absorbed completely by psychedelic culture because it mirrors the beautiful tapestries woven by the loom of the psychedelic mind." (159)
"The allure may come partially from the sense of life emanating from each computer-screen pixel. The screen is electronic and glows from within. Each pixel is a scintilla mirroring our own light of consciousness and potentially affecting the subtle energy bodies surrounding our physical body. Because a computer model is a mathematically based form that is protean, infinitely malleable through 3-D modeling and morphing technology, it points to the transformative capacity of form itself. Computer-modeling technology is a visionary tool. One of the purposes of visionary art is to show the transformative nature of reality. We all want to transform something in our lives or in our world. Any natural process or work of art that demonstrates transformation can be a metaphor that empowers one's own capacity to change. People in a jam, in a trap, in a polluted mess, need to know that there is a way out. Morphing cyberspace technoart offers some psychologically loaded and potentially transformative special effects." (159-160)
"The delights and terrors of the visionary realm are more than amusements and curiosities. If we can access the transcendental realms, our visions and the art flowing from them can become important reminders of our highest nature. The Buddha said that a brief glimpse of the enlightened state is worth many years of scholarly study." (161)
"The visionary, archetypal realms of consciousness have dimensions that seem eternal, dimensions that evolve over millennia, and more dynamic creative terrains. Blake and the Neoplatonists describe the ideal archetypal realms as "eternal" with a permanence that sometimes seems static. I think this was based on the revelation that there is a realm beyond time. The ultimate ground of being is beyond all forms and archetypes, beyond birth and death, beyond time and space, beyond mind and the flow of thoughts. The Tibetan teachings of Dzogchen describe this perfect state as the primordial condition of emptiness, clarity, and pure creative potentiality. It is the context underlying reality, voidness pregnant with the potential to manifest all forms. This absolute primordial condition gives birth to the archetypal realm, a rich profusion of luminous forms perceptible to the visionary eye." (173)
"Mystic art is a window to the transformed view, which reveals all phenomena as inherently sacred. Art is an illusion that can coney the truth. In the same way, the entire world of forms is a magical illusion, an exhibition of transcendental artistry pointing to a greater truth…" (175)
"Some may mistakenly regard this as self-serving egoic hustling for fame and money, but if artists stay rooted in good intentions, their work can be a gift to illuminate and awaken a bewildered world. As Jesus said, If you have a lamp you don't hide it under a basket. Art is the lamp of the soul." (182)
"Art of Delusion
Materialistic desire for power, fame, and money can obscure an artist's higher calling, like clouds covering the sun. Ambitions to dominate, acquire influential friends, produce and sell more, tend to blind artists to the shining source of their own creativity. Conversely, artists who only stare at the sun and paint in their garret expecting the world to beat a path to their door are equally if not more deluded. The problem, once again, is achieving a balance of inner and outer needs. How do we work it out?" (182)
"Art need not serve only the confused desires and pathologies of the ego. Art can serve and reflect the condition of the human soul, which includes but transcends pathologies." (182-3)
"The messages fo most television programs and corporate advertising revolve around the quest for status, money, and power. Advertising is the art of glamorous deception and bad will, par excellence. All too frequently, the myths and stories given us by popular culture, and even high culture, represent or stimulate greed, lust, cynicism, anxiety, and despair. These negative states are addicting and can excite viewers, but in the absence of an ethical context for violence, these emotions can erode the soul and inspire acts of nihilism." (183)
"The implications of glamorizing such unethical behavior are easy to imagine. Yet many artists, enmeshed in today's culture industry, do not feel responsible for, or perhaps even capable of, "feeding the soul" through their works, which can only be done by serving a cause higher than one's own or the corporate sponsor's ego." (183-4)
"The primary political art of America is commercial advertising that extols the benefits of free-market capitalism. Advertising art is our most frequently encountered art form. …" (184)
"…As long as artists remain true to their authentic experience and vision, there is healing value in their creative effort." (190)
"There is tremendous power in the individual to positively or negatively affected the web of relationships. Art becomes a healing force to the degree that the artist can embrace and integrate the pathological shadow aspects of our collective being and still clearly point to the source of transcendent wellness and radiance that is our constant potential." (194-5)
"The revelation and acceptance of our identity emerges by the balance of the artistic will between the polarities of light and dark, good and evil, and is the most delicate business of an artist's life. … Everyone knows that they can become better than they are; in many ways art is founded on this principle. The transformative potential inherent in each person allows art to be a path of self-knowledge and self-transcendence." (195)
"The artist's mission is akin to the alchemist's task. The alchemist's great work was the transformation of gross material into spiritualized substance. Holding the goal of a soul-nurturing art in our hearts can sustain us through the trials and failures that are inevitable in the process of creation…" (200)
"Conventional art is an expression of the self or world as it is now. Kandinsky referred to such art as a child of its time. Transcendental art expresses something that you are not yet but that you can become. Kandinsky called this art the mother of the future. That's why you feel better after producing or viewing it. Transformative art expresses something beyond where you are. It demands that you recognize your higher nature and alter your life accordingly." (226)
"Spiritual art is driven by spiritual insight. All levels and depths of spiritual insight can find corollary expressions in art. The art is a carrier, a medium, a messenger of spiritual truth. In order for art to be sacred, it must refer to a sacred teaching or issue from a passionately realized spiritual truth. Art records the insight, but it is an object, created by mind and body. The seer, the witnessing awareness of all revelatory visions, is always primary. Uncreated presence is the source of all creation. the artist is a microcosm of universal creativity. Sacred artists need penetrating insight into their own true nature and devotional intensity in order to make art a spiritual practice." (226)
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