Our Mind is But a Garden II

I just put up a new website that needs traffic! To persuade you to visit I have this enticing offer. I am using my blog today to fight for me rather than the evolution of humanity! I need support for my work, please help me continue to provide counter imagery to the mainstream imagery we are constantly exposed to.

There is an opportunity to win the original oil on canvas above until November 1st 2008

Please go to http://www.evershed.com to participate and read what Michael Parenti has to say about the art world below.
Thanks

Our Mind is but a Garden.

Our mind is the garden
Wherein we grow our life,
Where a waterfall of voices
Cascade in our minds
Swimming with a myriad of choices
Every day and through the night
On all the days and years we live
And every time we may or might,

Each thought is a seed
Where the brambles are greed,
Magnolias are kindness
And vines choke the hosts
Of the mindless
Where love and vision,
Are a flourishing addition
And delicately tended thoughts
Bring passion with fruition.

So flaunt fine blossoms,
Sweet fragrances
And fruitful boughs
That drip with purpose
To render meaningful
All your hours.

And as you go
From thought to word to action
In time’s relentless fractions
Watch your thoughts,
For the bounty plucked,
The autumn come
The garden put to rest,
What did you do
What have you done?
Can you esteem your existence
In the greater garden of earth,
Do you feel as one?

Jane Evershed
And here is why I do my work...

Michel Parenti:

“What is referred to as the “art world” is not a thing apart from the art market. The latter has long been heavily influenced by a small number of moneyed personages like Huntington Hartford, John Paul Getty, Nelson Rockefeller, Paul Mellon, and Joseph Hirschorn, who have treated artworks not as part of our common treasure but, in true capitalist style, as objects of pecuniary investment and private acquisition. They have financed the museums and major galleries, the art books, art magazines, art critics, university endowments, and various art schools and centers- reaping considerable tax write-offs in the doing.* As trustees, publishers, patrons and speculators, these wealthy
few and their associates also exercise an influence over the means of artistic production, setting implicit ideological limits to creative expression. While they cannot always predetermine artistic output, they exercise much control over its distribution.#
Artists who move beyond acceptable boundaries run the risk of not being shown. In most high-toned art circles, political art that contains radical content is treated as an oxymoron and labeled “propaganda.” Art and politics do not mix, we are told----which would be news to such great artists as Goya, Daumier, Picasso, and Rivera.

While professing to keep art free of politics (“art for art’s sake”), the moneyed gatekeepers impose their own politically motivated definition of what is and is not art. For years, the art they bought, showed, and had reviewed was usually Abstract Expressionist and other forms of “non-objective” art, a genre that is sufficiently ambiguous to stimulate a broad range of aesthetic interpretations, having a sufficiently iconoclastic and experimental appearance while remaining politically safe in content---
Or lack of content. In more recent times as artists have reverted to a more realistic form, their art is still usually devoid of critical social themes. One need only visit our museums and galleries to find confirmation of this point.

Excerpted from “ The Culture Struggle” with the permission of the author, Michael Parenti.

*See Chin-Tao Wu, Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art intervention since the 1980’s
(New York/London Verso, 2002.)
#For an alternative approach to the distribution of art, see Jerry Fresia, “ A Call To Artists” Z Net Dec 15th 2004 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=26&itemID=6867

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vEF8LL0yMY