The Campaign For Real Art

The campaign for real art aims to reclaim art as an antidote to culture.

Culture is the sum of agreed upon perceptions in the net of symbols with which any group of animals recognises the world. Real Art is what perturbs these perceptions.

Art is inevitably absorbed by culture but only in the same way that our bodies will be absorbed by the earth. Before this happens both are alive.

One way to tell a live body from a dead one is its relation to the earth. Alive bodies stand out from and move around on top of the earth a lot more than the dead ones do. Similarly real art stands apart from the culture whereas dead art fits right in and is absorbed by it.

Real art exists in opposition to the culture it springs from, dead art has a comfortable home right there waiting for it.

Real art is strange, unsettling, perturbing. It doesn't fit or belong anywhere. It is new and we don't understand it, so how could there be a place for it? But then once it dies, once it is "understood", then we collect it and know exactly where to put it.

True art is always a perception, a feeling, it precedes thought and is never merely an object or an activity.

By the time culture gets round to calling something art it's long been dead. What culture calls art, even though it was made this morning, can only be a repetition of a long dead thing. If it was real art then the culture, necessarily, could not recognise it as such.

If it has a place, if it belongs, if it fits, if it already has an audience or a function then it's not really, or is no longer, art.

*I will art at you on any theme of your choosing for $50 a minute on zoom or your preferred platform.