How do we pass the time between the first cup of coffee in the morning and the last glass of wine at night? 
We go about our daily life trying to suck out the most juicy morsels of happiness we can with a bit of thought that we need to stay fit and healthy for as long as we can. 
Occasionally a spark of purity of thought occurs, squelched quickly by insistent emails and instagram and facebook friends sharing their last meal.
No time to purify anything because we are on overdrive to not miss the possibility of another moment of happiness. 
And who dictates  what it is to be? 
Our advertisers forever on guard to catch the unsuspecting mind into acquiring yet more and better stuff; keep them longing for far away lands, for more love (really only sex) for who has time for love in our mad rush to be happy. 
We glance at our iPhone every few minutes for a sign that we are on the right track and will soon be rewarded.
What track?
Fast track to no man’s land, the land of machine bothood, programmed by the needy rich with gaping holes for mouths.
And we allow ourselves to believe the next dress, car, barbecue or trip will matter, will make our existence meaningful.
And we walk by the homeless, shot children, the hungry while some gorge.
All the while hoping that machines will set us free, immune to impinging artificial waves on our brains. Willing to trade our dying souls for material comfort.
For who has time for soul searching? Not even the lifestyle gurus that confuse aerobics with real meditation, the kind that purifies your mind and soul. They feel high and think that is soul.
But alas soul requires heart, tears and gnashing of teeth when confronted with present day reality, a delving into the deep gut wrenching abyss of mortification and not a quest for perfection.

The role of art critic is flushed down the toilet along with critical thinking in our era of positivity, not positivity of doing just thinking.

The more we try to be positive it seems the worse our world gets.

Why? Ego is always motivated by desire for oneself, of happiness, money, beauty, fame, success etc. Ego thinks it is God. But in fact it is a recipe for spiritual death.

Doing positive acts towards others brings us out of our ego and closer to God. As does being able to scrutinize ourself realistically and change what needs to go.

So in the art world when we stopped being critical of art and life, it became dead.

Visual art became mickey mouse and a poem became kitsch.

Imagine being positive only when writing a poem.

"The deep crimson blood gushing from the beautiful cut impaled by my foot, sprinked red shiny drops on mossy green lawn creating a Pollock masterpiece." hahahahahaha

Who are the artists who sell well? Generally we would like to believe it is the artist that has the best art that sells well. And maybe that was true a few centuries ago when traditional art was the norm. Art that had great technique and also evoked emotions and had something to say.

Artists produced their art and someone else looked after publicity, exhibitions, and putting together bios as well as marketing. Usually a number of people. Then there were art critics who wrote about their work  and established its validity in the marketplace.
Now art needs not be technically accurate, say anything at all or evoke any kind of emotional response. So who decides what is good art?

Some say it is the unwashed masses who want to buy your work…

So do artists need to appeal to their sensibilities…? No, they just have to be good salesmen.

Artists are no longer just mandated with producing art but also have to be publicity star, networking schmoozers, write glowingly about themselves, pay for exhibiting their work and find venues to exhibit and above all, be  great salesmen.

Selling is an art form in itself and good used car salesmen will tell you, you have to be born with the right gene. Actors are probably the closest that come to having such a gene.

Actors are by nature extraverted, whereas visual artists are mostly introverts. A good salesman needs to be extraverted, charismatic and know how to charm and convince people. Most visual artists I know don’t even want to schmooze at their own shows and generally are shy and would much prefer being alone. Otherwise they would have chosen to be actors.

So thus we have a bind, where visual artists are expected to be all and everything, and in the end develop split personalities or simply give up focus on their art and become great salesmen.

Those are the artists that sell well and what they produce matters very little. And if they thought about it for a while they would have used their selling skills in a car lot for a hell of a lot more money than they are probably getting now for their art.

But there is always a subtle urge to be famous that comes with artistic endeavours, even though we know the possibility is one in a billion but then we remember Van Gogh who sold nothing in his lifetime.

The problem for us now however is the small matter of how we spend our time producing art. Van Gogh had a brother who supported him and he didn’t have to do anything else except paint and observe nature and life. We however don’t have that luxury needing to make a living and interact with the market place. This takes more time than actually art-working. ​

The industrial age effectively killed great art and is now producing great used car salesmen.

Katia Grubisic, a poet and writer for The Walrus a canadian magazine wrote that..”In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many of us were in shock and were doing whatever we could to help. A number of cultural organizations—orchestras, arts councils, museums—reacted by withdrawing support for Russian artists and arts organizations. But does cancelling artists do more harm than good?” And she concludes it is “knee-jerk wartime discrimination.”​

I now know for sure why I have stopped reading The Walrus a longtime ago. First of all to say that watching thousands of women and children die before your eyes on social media everyday is no longer shocking says more about Katia than us,. Secondly I listened and watched famous Russian artists talk about the war in Ukraine saying how much they support Putin and Mother Russia and one even added that all Ukrainians should die!

There is no inherent value in being an artist that makes you stand above being a decent human being. Nazis artists that promote killing have really nothing of value to offer the world and should be shunned.

Real artists are sensitive compassionate humans and abhor violence. If they portray it in their art it is to wake people up to its horrors, not to show how lovely and innocuous it is. Many artists stopped creating during WWII as a sign of rebellion and disgust with the war.

Art writers that think otherwise should stop writing.

Being a visual artist is really all about seeing things as they are below the surface, below your conceptual mind. You learned to create visual shortcuts in school from about the age of 11, when abstract thinking became more important than seeing. So you created shortcut images in your mind for the everyday world. When you heard the word dog, you immediately conjured up an image of a hot dog with ears, a tail and four stick legs. Then your mind did not have to linger any longer on the image. You knew what the other person was referring to. Unfortunately due to the fact that left-brained activities became the most important through your school career and later on, you stopped really seeing altogether.
Drawing is really about learning how to see light and dark shadows and the edges of things, contour lines. Most people never pay attention to these things preferring to use their symbols conjured up in there minds.
When I taught adults art, who were beginners and did not have time to go through four years of art college and learn technique, I would teach them to see and think like an artist instead. Often times they were able to draw a decent self-portrait after eight lessons, instead of four years of school.
Why you ask? Because they learned how to really see what was there.
One of my exercises was to have them view a white bland coffee mug for ten minutes without thinking about anything else, a sort of mindfulness meditation. At first they struggled due to an overactive mundane mind, thinking to themselves “how boring, I came to learn to draw faces, not white mugs.” But with encouragement they overcame their resistance and started to become involved in the seeing itself. One of the reasons they struggled is because they were used to being primarily in their left brain with the kinds of activities demanded of them in their everyday life. The extreme left side of the brain functions in a very fast way, needing more and more stimulation and being easily bored, needing constant novelty. Thus the technological fast-paced age is born, feeding that need.
To help my students pop over more to the right side of their brain, they needed to stay with their feelings of boredom until the left side gave up (apparently it gives up only in times of boredom or shock and I could not bring a gun to class) and the right side to take over a more leadership function.
Things would suddenly change and people began to get excited about the activity and find meaning in it. People who insist we always use both sides of the brain maybe are correct but we need to understand that the brain is vast and unexplored and it is useful to talk about the continuum line, where activities are placed, to understand how we can have more control of the brain. There is a lot of research on this topic I won't go into, just share my own experience of how to move people from an uncreative way of perceiving the world to a creative one.
What happened next astonished them. All of a sudden they began to enjoy what they were doing and were able to see more and more of what the cup actually represented, in other words they saw more than just the cup, plus the cup as is, and they felt wonderful doing it.
I used to tell them if they actually looked at their partners and children and pets in the same way, life would be nothing but adventure and a miracle for them. Unfortunately after the initial honeymoon we start imagining we know our partners inside out, have a shortcut version of them in our minds and actually stop seeing them at all.
Out of touch with our senses, imprisoned in our conceptual mind we also stop feeling and need more and more stimulation to know we are alive. It is no wonder porn is big business.
The adults in my classes did not necessarily become professional artists but their lives started to change, they learned to enjoy and appreciate every moment of their existence, they become more tolerant, less judgemental and saw the world as mostly beautiful. That is what really seeing will do for you.