A lengthy but worth-while apology . . .

I feel I should apologize for my recent post at www.orual.blogspot.com. A wise man once said:
Art may be propaganda,
but propaganda is never art.
--William James Minnis
And, you see, I passed this piece of art off as a bit of social commentary. I suppose I wasn’t entirely at fault. Sometimes, when art is pure, it does highlight social hypocrisy and inspire change. Look at Ruskin. He wrote of his observations of weather—that was all. Yet through his simple observations, one derives a whole wealth of social commentary. Yes, Cisco may feel that he was a hypocritical fake with a hidden agenda, but I hold that all artists could stand to learn a lesson from him.

I suppose what I mean to say is what I jotted down on the pad by my lamp last night. Propaganda creates an image of reality and, therefore, truth that reveals a lie or hypocrisy and inspires change. Take an infomercial. Say it is about knives. If I were selling you a knife, I would start by showing you the horrible way in which you lived before, highlighting a false reality. You see the frazzled homemaker in the kitchen cutting fingers and toes, and ruining all the sweet blessedness of the home-cooked meal with her sweat and blood, and you believe that this has been you—duped into the false belief that you had to live this hellish life for the sake of a good meal! No my friends! You don’t DESERVE such a life! But you see that anyway. You saw that truth as soon as you saw reality and the lie you had believed. Suddenly you have the inspiration to correct this injustice, to RIGHT this WRONG!! TO EXPOSE THE LIE AND LET THE WORLD KNOW THE TRUTH!! YOU’RE WORTH MORE THAN THIS!!! A LOT MORE!!! 10 EASY PAYMENTS OF $24.99 MORE!!! And there you have it: the perverted form of art known as propaganda.

If propaganda creates a false or synthesized reality to serve its purposes, than art does the opposite, highlighting a portion of true reality with no other intention. Because reality holds truth, it may expose the lies and hypocrisy of life. Doing this may inspire social reform among the enlightened, but it will be an inadvertent effect if the art is pure.

So I apologize on two planes. My art did take on a sort of propaganda-like tone, although it started pure. But the second plane holds a truth that has been burning into my soul for too long now: to write truth, we must write reality and to write reality, we must write observation, and to write observation, we must write from experience—the deadly e-word. ): I’ve never been a starving artist—nowhere close, accept for a couple all-nighters I pulled with nothing in my stomach or in the room and a frigid workspace. There were aspects of that story I related to. I wrote quickly and smoothly about those. The rest became a bit more burdensome and now it is clear why.

Gosh, so there’s my confession. I wonder if anyone will read this. (: