All Art Is Quite Useless

All art is quite useless

If people were labeled with just one word to represent them, to sum up their many chapters of life, one word to define them completely, then the label you’d least come across would be that of artist. Seldom does one come to this earth with the natural ability, the gift to see the world as a painting, freshly finished on his canvas. The power to be forever praised on the walls of aging art museums. And the shear courage to go through life as an anomaly, a rare breed that makes heads turn the other way.

It will be one rough journey for the young artist, however. Life will throw him around in a complicated mixture of feelings, thoughts and emotions, as he will desperately seek to find out who he is and what his purpose in life is. As his mind keeps sinking in dark, depressive moments of contemplation, the world around him will gradually affect him less, and his subconscious will start building the foundations of a brand new world, inside his head. A world where clocks melt under the persistence of the moment, where the horizon bends under a quill and nature explodes into a force against which we are meaningless; a world of beauty, color and contrast where poverty does not exist; where pain, solitude, depression and agony have no meaning.

Trying to copy this odd world into something humanly translatable, the artist will spend day and night, paint and paper, ink and blood trying to find a way to turn his vision into a reality. Speeding across the highways of creation, searching for a muse under every unturned stone, he will have most certainly picked up a few bad, mind altering addictive habits along the way. His body gradually deteriorates as he constantly stretches his senses to the limit, trying to get to some promised, higher level of existence, a metaphysical metamorphose, but never leaving the cold ground.

Hours blend with days and minutes turning time into a vague, discontinuous notion that the artist disconsideres while lost in an unstoppable, mechanical trance, creating piece after piece of critic’s junk that nobody cares for.

Then he turns to love. The one last vice he doesn’t need. He seeks for it through poems, centerfolds and dimly lit streets, pursuing the scent of pheromones oozing from every corner of the sacrilegious part of a town soaked in moonlight. His heart will crush against the cliffs of contemporary romance, so very different from the one he read or dreamt about. Reject after reject, in time he will learn to cope with his fait, he will accept his social ineptitude, and he will retreat back to his own world, back to solitude, back to smoke and numbness, back, for one last time, to his canvas…where his kingdom waits to be born.

And so, after all words are said, after all life resources spent, after all promises expired and all knowledge worth knowing absorbed, the artist is ready to create for one last time. As the first stroke lashes across the