December 28, 2011
On reading today's above-the-fold story in today's New York Times about the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated by men against women in war-torn Somalia, I find myself returning again to an issue I've been struggling with for a good two or three years: Do fine and performing artists have a moral obligation to address issues of inhumanity in their art, no matter how obliquely?
It is a daunting, troublesome question for this maverick multi-media creative -- writer, musician and visual artist -- a deciple of the Tanscendentalists who celebrated the supremacy of the individual and his implied right, on condition of social responsibility, to be precisely who he is while inhabiting the realm of creative self-expression.
The history of the visual arts shows us with ____ decisiveness that the gulf between sweet depictions of flowers in a meadow (Kinkaid) and frightening elucidations of death and decimation (Heronymous Bosch) is both vast and irrefutable.
