The Heart Transplant

Essay on the The Heart of Markets

The coming age will require a new kind of human being, one that has an internal sense of gravity in the weightlessness of the coming digital/virtual revolution.  This sense of moral centeredness equates to a form of conviction that can only be called irrational, prophetic.  We have come to the end of reason’s supremacy, as rational exchange cannot keep up with social change.  If we are to give our new social/global order a soul then we must embark on a journey into the primitive origins out of which all of history has arisen.

What does this have to do with my new painting The Heart of Markets?  Well, I spent more than 3 months on this painting.  When I reached the 2 month mark I began to worry about the time investment I was making.  Time is money, right?  And here I was spending, spending, spending all this time, pouring all that unearned money into this object of art.  Every day that I made the minor decision to spend a bit more time on some square inch of this work, I was making the larger decision to confront an existential issue in the life of every artist; the relationship between the market and those objects that flow within it, products of human craftsmanship.

Production is the expression of a businessperson’s power and I had a production schedule as every good merchant was supposed to.  But this painting was compelling me to put aside my own goals, it was subverting the power dynamic between the creator and the created, asking me to set aside my own concerns for its sake.  As I slaved away day after day, crafting this work to a ridiculous point of clarity, unsure of what I was making, I became clear of only one thing, that I had within me market pressures, that I had become infected with that business free-market model of creativity.  This painting was rebelling against me, my will, and my desire to outproduce my fellows.  It was humbling me.

I decided as the result of a long process to share this journey in an effort to surrender to the fullness of my being and to counter that business model of artistic production, a paradigm that strips the awe and wonder out of the experience and nurtures our most base attributes.  I wanted to share the depth of the creative experience, how the thought and symbolism that go into every choice and every act can build into a hyper-personal, divinely inspired experience that transcends the market and ultimately changes the artist, and by doing so fills him/her with hope that the object has the power within it to change the world.

This summer was marked early on by a period of intense self-doubt.  I was beginning to wonder if my ideals, my desires for justice and progress were naïve and self-destructive.  I thought perhaps, as many men and women do, that a bit of practicality and self-interest would serve me and my family, and would represent a kind of maturity.  And that would mean the elimination of certain practices in my life that would simplify and make more efficient the production of my art.  Watching the world tear itself apart in war, ignorance and greed was augmenting the feeling of hopelessness about the power of the individual and I reached out with this process, as I do, letting those I love know about these doubts, wondering if my writing and public acts of resistance were a waste of time.

As described later this self-doubt did pass and when it did I opened up to the fullness of who I am as a human being and decided to commit more than ever to a comprehensively expressive life, reaching out in a variety of ways to share my idealism and youthful hopes and dreams.    In direct opposition to that truism that says ‘If a work of art needs explaining then it failed as a work of art’, a truism I have myself nodded in agreement with, I now present this essay as an opening up to my humanity, the paradoxical foolishness and freedom that I give myself in the future to explore all the layers of my creative spirit, and as a result make a deeper more personal relationship with my audience possible.

That old vision, one I had taken on as a result of living and working tirelessly in a capitalistic world, the way of seeing myself as a tireless young capitalist working to carve out a small niche of notoriety for myself was beginning to depress me.  It’s not that I do not want success and recognition, I do, it’s just that the nature of that recognition has become itself somewhat tedious.  Successful artists are more often discussed in terms of money than ideas.  They talk about their collectors more than the work, and a deeper discussion of artistic meaning is hard to come by.  Just to be clear, I have had some successes.  In fact, I consider myself quite lucky as a young artist.  I am not writing as a person who is lacking in support or praise, I am not bitter, per se.  Rather, I have noticed myself becoming more and more sheepish about expressing a lack of enthusiasm for the art world itself, the structure of it, the constant search for outside approval, branding, commerce, galleries and artists attempting to come together temporarily for a shared exploitation.  I wanted, as an artist, to openly profess my skepticism about the art world on a primitive level, a real intuitive disdain for its values.  When I discussed these things with my God, and I do that - what else is there a creative person who spends years in isolation, but an imaginary friend that grows more and more complex and profound every day? - when I addressed my highest self I was embarrassed by the ways in which I would walk submissively into those hallowed galleries like a beggar asking for the blessing of fame, making a temple out of a warehouse.  Something was beginning to feel wrong about this, about how artists had become, or were, isolated from one another, split apart by gallery owners, who we all know were failed artists.

There is a cold materialism that bleeds down the walls of every gallery, as fashion strangles all the life out of an ancient form of magic.  As an artist I have the desire to belong to something idealistic, radical and progressive and when I go to any artistic venue I feel the same existential drift that occurs after a few hours at the mall.  For the cold comfort of cash it seems the character of art has become a caricature.  And again, I am not averse to money, I would like very much to go to the grocery store and not add up my cart before getting to the check out, but don’t we all feel this way?  Isn’t there something about our whole society right now that feels this way?  And what do you want from your artists?  Do you want us too to buckle down and play it safe?  Do you want us out there competing with you over limited resources, begging for the right to belong, using old scams to serve leftovers?  Making fashion out of formulas, using market analysis to create powerful brands that the rich elite can use to adorn their walls in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the poor?  Is this really what we want to be as artists?

Have we become so skeptical and cool about the universe, so assured of the state of nature that we produce objects to fulfill a need like performing unconscious organs in the body of humanity?  Is there anything left of the individual?  Or are we all professionals exhibiting in ironic ways the ways in which we fool the market?  And so we make repetitious work to express our repetitious lives, lives so overfilled with work, that we have very little time to invest in art as a means of self-discovery, rather we thank our artists for providing a carnivalesque momentary escape, but one that will not dare capture us, that will not ask anything more of us than pleasure or even a kind of shock that convinces us we are free, when we are not.  This business plan gathers international respect as a virtue with very few people asking themselves if it gives an artist pleasure to make the same painting over and over and over and over.

Writing this is an attempt to shatter that capitalistic illusion whereby I assure you that I am on my way to super-stardom, in order to keep you watching, investing in me as a selfish investment in your own search for transcending the downward pull of impoverishment.  This is an attempt to replace contempt with connection, to reach out to you as fellow human beings, to say I am an artist interested in a revolution in the arts, but not simply one marked by a trivial stylistic choice.  Rather, I am looking for that revolution that resonates from the depths of the human heart, as a result of our longing for a more community-minded culture.  This is an affirmation of my innate value as a human being and an effort to break free of social mores that are killing us, a set of expectations that increase like a runaway train.  Competition has its limits, and we must remember we are in this together.

But I could go on, instead I will get back to the heart of this.  The most frightening aspect of my creative journey this summer was that I had no idea what my painting was about.  After 2 months I had an interesting image, but the fear was magnified by a lack of awareness about it.  I had chosen to use the image of a human heart, and I chose to paint it upside down.  I knew, for some reason, that I wanted the facial indicators to be unclear, confused, but that was it, these were what you might call my a priori knowledge about the work.  One of the joys of creative work is the joy of discovery that comes from exploring human intuition, when the meaning in one’s work reveals itself.  Often times, when I’m halfway through with a painting I realize exactly what it is I want to say with the piece and the breakthrough helps me to unify the work and finish.  And this is what I wanted with this painting, I wanted the answer so I could conclude the labor, so that I could put this product on the market and move on.  But this upside down heart sat unbeating in my studio, insisting I keep working at it, with nothing to guide me but a devotion to crafting it with the best blends, the best color shifts I could come up with.  As with every spiritual awakening, this one came when I surrendered to a kind of failure of the will, when I opened up to the lesson, even if it came at a high price.

The 2 month mark was significant because it meant I was a full month behind production schedule, and so I had to face it head on, seeing it would easily take me another month, if I continued working in this fastidious way, to complete this greedy little painting.  And when I looked at this head on, I saw myself in the mirror of the canvas.  I saw my own greed, my own hunger to dominate, to prove my powers through inflated production and I was humbled by this vision because all of us artists, or most hopefully, believe that somehow, even with the compromises we make, we are staying true to our work and that engagement in business is really just a way of serving our vision.  But here I was looking at this upside down heart wondering ‘What does this mean?’  This painting was small, by comparison, not too flashy, and had no central human figure, it was by all accounts, a diversionary piece.  I could not stop thinking ‘What will I get out of this?’

Let me digress for a moment, before I tell you about the resolution, to tell you about my particular stage of life, where I am at as a man.  I am 34 years old and I have lived a very exciting and rewarding life.  I would call the story of my life somewhat adventurous, filled with tough challenges and hi-stakes risks and victories over the odds that were often stacked against me.  My unique abundance of luck has reinforced my faith in a God that watches over me and so I have very little fear of death.  I’ve had a one-man show that opened up on the world’s greatest block of art galleries, I’ve sold well and I have a reputation for good work.  Let us just say that the little kid inside of me, the one full of doubts and fears and hopes, has been satisfied.  I’m married to the love of my life and I have a beautiful 1 and ½ year old daughter who loves her daddy.  All this to say that I am in that particular place in life that Alan Watts talks about where a major journey has been completed.  I am here, I have arrived.  I am a man now, not a young man, just a man staring at the crossroads of here, thinking about the kind of future, the type of adventure I want to make of the next 3rd of my life.  And so, in hindsight, I am not surprised that this creative struggle happened this summer.

There is a choice that faces a man like myself who has everything that he wants.  One, he could work hard, work safe, and maintain and protect all that life has given him, thinking himself lucky.  Or two, he can go inward, trusting to his instincts and take the second trimester of his life and go again for impossible odds, alive with the wonder of what else might be possible for him.  But, an important distinction must be made.  Having all that he has, he is free to think about more than himself in the calculus of future dreaming.  A satisfied man is able to wonder if perhaps now, more than ever, he might be able to do something to make the world a better place, seeing his luck as a great gift, but not one he ought to hold onto selfishly.  For what good is a gift that does not open one up to the generosity from which it came?  Whatever you might think about such a choice it is important to understand that the great majority, the world, has always had a particular opinion about what I ought to do.  “Be a professional, grow up, you are talented, now go out there and be a good little businessman and build up the wealth of your family!”  This is more tempting than I can describe, and this writing is evidence of my desperate desire to escape this temptation.

There is no way of knowing if the world is more conservative, more business-minded now than it used to be but when I look around it does seem there’s a lot of oppression out there.  My family and loved ones are working harder and harder every day and getting less and less, screwed at work, screwed at the grocery store, screwed at the gas tank, screwed when they are sick, screwed when they are healthy.  Life is taxing, taxing, taxing, everywhere and everything has the hands of middlemen all over it.  When I look at this, when I see the inequity growing every day between those at the top and those who labor, between the artist and gallery owner, the owner and player, the principal and the teacher, and on and on, I say to myself, even if I was to think in business terms, even if I was to adopt a pragmatic attitude about this sacred thing I do, art, then why would I expect to do any better than my family, people who work for years for a company that takes more and more from them every day?  In fact, I might be even more tempted to adopt a business-model if it even worked anymore!  There is no security in that!  We are all being swallowed up by corporations who are crafting our worlds in an unconscious mechanistic way that reflects nature more than it does the human creative capacity.  If I continue to go out there and beg the rich elite to bless me as one of their chosen decorators, a brand more for them than me, will they treat me any better than they treat you?  And is this what you want from your artists, begging fools with no chutzpah!?  And most importantly, what affect will this have on the art?  Does not an artist have a responsibility to live in a way that inspires greatness?

It is undeniable that we live in a world that places a high value on the mysterious force called ‘the market’, and that market unmanaged seeks efficiency, and we, as the subjects sacrifice our labor and love to that efficiency, and as it becomes more and more unregulated by human dignity and compassion, we are forced to ask ourselves if we love the market more than we love one another, and our actions represent our answers.  When I looked at my canvas, this upside down heart with a devilish face, I saw myself, and how I was trying to align myself with the pyramid scheme called capitalism, how I was taking what was most sacred to me, the gift that gave me a life I love, I was taking my art, in small ways, this is not a rejection of all my work, but I was in my own heart, pushing it hard for the sake of efficiency.

This was the humbling blow of this work.  All my artwork humbles me.  Somebody asked me the other day if I ever feared hitting a creative wall, a block, and I said to him, that an artist does nothing but deal with creative blocks, that is the process of creation.  When artists say they have been blocked, as if it were a disease, they are frauds.  Every work of art is a block transcended, but every transcendence also exacts a price from the creator, a sacrifice.  When I stood there contemplating the horns of this dilemma, to finish the work quickly in service to my production schedule, or surrender to the highest truth of this work, I was on one side of the awareness.  Only after making my decision would I have access to the consequences, and only then would I change as a human being, and only then would I know what this painting was about.  When I stood up to this mirror, the challenge that this painting offered me, when I looked myself in the eyes - I must confess that a man given all that he has desired has a certain liberty – I saw the rascal in me and I said ‘Fuck it!’  I committed myself to this work, to give it every bit of love and attention it wanted.

After a few days on this new path the answers began revealing themselves to me and I realized that I was working on a portrait.  This painting was a portrayal of the heart of the market, the heart of our 21st century society, one that places a price on lives, and wages war with our communities and seeks to divide us on religious and economic grounds.  I realized that money is supposed to represent ‘real’ values, goodness, fairness, justice, quality, dependability, honesty, and when it stopped being symbolic of these concrete realities it started subtracting value from every exchange, every sale, every claim to owed debt.  This upside down world is tearing us all apart, and we are all cutting corners in our work, sacrificing the customer for the company, relying on our talents in the hopes that we will win the war against our fellows for the sake of our fragile families.  Our hearts have become shadows of the minds that drive us to calculate percentages and risks and evaluate our choices, driven by the adrenaline in a flight or fight life.  The heart is the nexus of love, compassion and justice, it can guide us back to a more humane society, but to get there we must let go of the upside down vision that our minds nurture of the world, a fear-based model of the future.  That is what our minds are good for, calculating worst-case scenarios, but given dominance our minds will also manifest a worst-case reality.

I became aware of all of this as I surrendered to the voice of the painting.  An artist is in a unique position to advocate for a more intuitive society, as an artist depends greatly on the heart, on accidental grace for the revelation of beauty.  My life has been the result of wild faithful risks and attempts to change the world, delusional visions of my own efficacy.  However, I saw that if I did anything less than this, if I surrendered to a pious professionalism, that it was not just a kind of ego-deflating defeat facing me.  More than this, it was simply boring, a tedious life spent gathering profits and building security against my fellow human beings whom I would fear in direct proportion to my economic distance.  And so, using my canvas, as I have my whole life, I made my actions symbolic of a rebellion against the expectations of the machine.  I decided to make this painting perfect, or as close to that as my skills would take me, and thus discover the breadth of my talent.

As I was going through all this I spoke to a good friend.  I told him that I was beginning to doubt the usefulness of ideals, I was beginning to wonder if it was futile to think of the world itself as a blank canvas.  Perhaps, I said, the world will never change, that I should just get out there and do my best to grab a little money for myself.  I told him I did not want to live in delusion any more.  He said ‘We are all delusional man, every one of us!  You gotta pick your delusion and run with it!’  And as silly as that sounded, it made me laugh out loud, because there was a deep truth in it, and I had to admit he was right.  The universe is a creation of human intention and so my future was mine to craft.  I could lie down and let the wave of bitterness and futility swallow me up, as it is doing everywhere, or I could choose to be defiant, and attempt to live heroically with all the consequential dangers.  And benefiting from over 30 years of trying to live as a hero I, frankly, had a lot more experience as a hero than I did a practical man, so there was a kind of higher practicality leading me back to my prophetic vision.  And more than this, I was no longer alone.  As a man ages he collects people who remind him from time to time of his true self.  This is the greatest treasure we can have.

I should begin wrapping this up now, as I think I have made somewhat clear the intentions that went into making this painting, but I want to finish by explaining a bit more of my intentions for writing this essay.  Like all manifestos, this is more a promise to myself than anything else, a naked expression of vulnerability meant to resuscitate a sleeping heart of ideological passion.  As a result of my work on this painting I was given a sense of direction for my future and a new teenage-like enthusiasm for the challenges therein, a future that once again knows no bounds.  Like most things in my life, I do not take credit for these insights; I have been given these creative visions from an outside source.  There is a boundary between what I claim as myself, and the work that happens as a result of living.  Some might call such a mysterious possession a curse, and they are right too, for creative living in a world so mechanized involves struggle, but I am always aware of where I fall on the spectrum of human suffering, and I live in the top 1 percent, so my struggles are intellectual in nature and should, therefore, be accompanied by a constant search for humility and justice.  Ironically, it is my self-doubt and humility that brings me back to my prophetic voice.  As I sought to disappear into the world of my own riches my friends and loved ones demanded that I fulfill the promises of my youth and that I continue to fight for something more than just myself, and the wealth of my own family.  They helped me remember moments when I was a child, alone, when at night I would pray, beg for a special power so I could get out of the ghetto, and I made promises, that if I was granted these gifts I would fight to make the world better.  These memories are humbling because now here I am and I have to follow through.

Choice is an illusion we give to ourselves as we experience the unfolding of self.  I have to submit to you that when I paint I am trying to save the world.  Every act of my creative will is meant to urge us back to thinking about God, about the Universe, about what our souls consist of, how we ought to live, about love and spirit and wonder and happiness and especially sharing, sharing the riches of this world equally and putting an end to warfare and if it is hubris to think an artist can do this, then oh well.  This essay is a high act of confession, an attempt to escape the continuous cycle of business-mindedness that haunts us, in every exchange, every holiday, every marriage, every friendship, every choice of our eyes, tongues, feet and hands, so that somehow I can get back to living and honoring myself and others, trusting that we are not all lazy no-good creatures that need constant incentives to avoid taking advantage of one another, but that we are good and worthy and come with all the best intentions of working for one another’s well being.

I hope you enjoy this painting.  I cannot tell you much about where all this comes from.  I can only tell you that it is as mysterious to me as it might be to you, but I did surrender completely to it, and am confident that the vision is quite pure, and in so doing I found a deeper source of strength and faith, and I hope that by viewing it you can get in touch with that.  Human beings are miraculous creatures, able to continue to attempt the impossible.  For thousands of years humanity has sought to paint on the flat surface of things, and in doing so, engage in the magic of creation, expressing the depth and wonder of the world and its spirit.  We are not different from the animals because we are conscious, they are also conscious; we are different because we can appreciate the paradox within existence.  Our contemplation of the constant tensions of opposites is the ancient path to wisdom and when I remain committed to this I reconnect with my ancient cave-painting shamanic ancestors.

One last thing.  It requires much more rigor to argue for the absolute worthlessness of the world than it does to remain open to the possibility for glory.  In other words, I might be foolish to believe that my painting could change or even save the world, but it is equally, if not more foolish to feel certain that it cannot.  There are those who would be greatly served if we stopped believing in the individual, which equates to us ceasing to believe in ourselves.  Maybe a little foolish delusion will be the defibrillating surge that will allow the blood of passion, desire and love to begin flowing through the body of humanity, giving us a new heart, a new feeling of warmth in our chest when we think about our future and belonging to a species that is unquestionably unique.