Burning Life

The journalist in me loves having new terrain to cover. The entrepreneur loves running a metaverse strategy and content creation company. The artist in me (the artiste, as my artiste mother likes to say) is at home in Second Life. The snapshots below are from an exhibit at Burning Life, SL's answer to the spirit of Burning Man. I didn't have much time to explore the exhibit but this was the first place I landed. At first blush, it was a big nauseating. Bear with me to the end. Go ahead and look. Go...






The thing about great art is that it makes people think differently. It isn't just to give us something pretty to hang over the dining room table, but to express something unique to the consciousness of the artist and create a new impression in the mind of a viewer. The new idea might not be pleasant, but many realities aren't.

This exhibit focuses on animals: pets or meat? The lonely little shack is disturbingly empty except for a decrepit and filthy toilet where the outer world of carnivores can come in to let nature run its course. Joseph Campbell once pointed out that life consumes life in order to survive. He was not the first to make this observation, though his eloquence in contextualizing the meaning of it is unparalleled. Great art is not always presented with a perfect pink satin bow.

I am feeling particularly fierce about my defense of the importance of art in culture at the moment, ever since the other day while watching the vice-presidential debates (on CNN.com, which also broadcast the presidential debate, sponsored by ExxonMobil). It was announced that the audience had agreed to be "polite." An entire audience (much less both candidates) agreed to be "polite," as if that's a good thing, at a time of domestic collapse and foreign disaster. The giggling and constant "with all due respects" offered by Senator Joe Biden coupled with Governor Sarah Palin's saccharine "doggonits" demonstrate cultural artlessness and a complete lack of nuance. The entire event was totally stripped of art--and I don't mean performance art, because it was loaded with that. I mean a subtler, more nuanced form of interaction bred of critical thought.

I mean art. Life, and culture, as art.