|
||||
|
be a realistic hope for treatment. Our own means are slight, our tools meager, our audience scattered. But our platform, though small, has its own durability, and we can at least speak our minds. One of our principal tools is the arts. Art is not merely the creation of autonomous works for the satisfaction of aesthetic pleasure, a consolation for life's disappointments and the inevitable limits of our ignorance and mortality, or a wish fulfillment fantasy for artist and audience: art -- whether poetry or music, literature or film, drama or the dance or the new arts of interactivity and collective simulation -- invites humanity to transform the world into its image; is a call to guide our lives toward the realization of the heart's most incorrigible 
|
desires in forms that will thrive in the world that we know and that made us possible. Art is the image of man's hope in this universe, "inflationary" as it may be and incommensurable to the calculi, as it threatens one day to become, of the physicists, even when, perhaps especially when, it portrays the most horrific aspects of life, the overwhelming despair that the human condition has brought to many. But for hope to be realized, the actual has to be faced, examined, and judged; where exonerated, conserved and cultivated and cherished; where condemned, not destroyed, but reconstructed into another experiment (as all of life is) on possibility. - Christopher Bernard Christopher Bernard is the founding editor of Caveat Lector. |
|||
