Month: February 2025

What is Art for, and Why is it Important?

This post is a combined response to a couple of questions initially posed on Quora and written in their full format as, “As an artist, how would you answer this question? What is art for?” and “What is the importance of art in our society?”

Canadian poet Irving Layton described artists as canaries in coal mines because they are the barometers for society, which compels us to expand our perceptions by confronting often harsh truths.

Art changes how we understand the world by reflecting reality back to us within directed contexts to focus our attention on aspects of life presented in often unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable ways.

Art enriches our lives and reminds us of our humanity while connecting us through the artist’s work.

“What is the importance of art in our society?”

To adequately address this rather direct but general question, some context is needed to frame an answer which fully encompasses its implications.

There are three general perspectives upon which to address this question.

From an individual’s perspective

The importance of art in an individual’s life is a broadening of perspective and a deepening of insight into… well, literally everything about the human condition. From an observer’s perspective, art connects us on a visceral level. Whether it be music that moves us, a few well-chosen words, or an awe-inspiring spectacle, the experience is a validation of belonging to something greater.

From an artist’s perspective, it’s the cheapest therapy form.

Cumulatively, society benefits from the positive contributions resulting from affirmative expressions of community life within larger societies.

From a community’s perspective

Art brings attention to issues often overlooked, misunderstood, misrepresented, or misapprehended in ways which provide unmatched clarity in creating understanding. Art can mobilize a community and motivate social change, contributing to stability within larger societies.

From a society’s perspective

Art reflects the most profound truths about life, the human condition, and society in general.

Art provokes social introspection and defines boundaries while providing clarity on issues.

Art provides the public with psychologically supportive outlets of expression that contribute to overall social stability.

Artistic activity provides a healthy return on investment to every level of an economy.

Artistic history provides us with deep insights into our evolution as a species, and it is an activity that also provides insights into our future, like every other discipline of discovery.

“Art interprets the visible world. Physics charts its unseen workings. The two realms seem completely opposed. But consider that both strive to reveal truths for which there are no words — with physicists using the language of mathematics and artists using visual images.”

Art and Physics, Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light — Leonard Shlain

Art & Physics | by Leonard Shlain

“Leonard Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first culture member to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world. Escorting the reader through the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern eras, Shlain shows how the artists’ images create a compelling fit when superimposed on the physicists’ concepts.”

Why do people work for leaders they don’t like?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why did people work for demanding leaders such as Steve Elon Musk? If they do not like them, why couldn’t they change their job?”

Jobs are not items in a grocery store that one can pick and choose at leisure.

Each job is a springboard to a better job or a deep dive into an abyss.

It cannot be stressed enough how critical it is to career success that one always has an exit strategy and a place to go if one’s job turns sour.

Jobs often go sour for reasons unrelated to performance and often due to abusive behaviours by management.

A personal case is one in which I was often extolled for my leadership skills while my supervisor would say to me, “You run a tight ship.” He would say these words to me while appreciating how much easier his life was due to my contributions. When I asked him for a reference letter, he wrote me a generic description of my length of employment as an act of spite to limit my options. He deliberately wanted to make it harder for me to make a vertical or even a lateral move away from an abusive environment in which he fraudulently presented himself as an ally who empathized with the abusive treatment I received from his supervisor.

Making matters more challenging is that jobs often go sour to such a degree that they are worse than not having a reference to support one’s candidacy for the next job. In my case, the Senior VP decided it would be fun to play a game of pretend I don’t know you each time we encountered each other. This went on for five years while I struggled with a salary 40 percent below market for my role on paper as I performed at levels higher than the manager and director above my role. They were happy to have me around, while I often saved their bacon and changed their tunes quickly when I chose not to go above my role and intervene to fix their mistakes.

A job relationship gone sour can become a barrier to continuing one’s career. More people than one would like to believe will easily choose spite to justify sabotaging a person’s career development efforts.

Someone as petty as Elon Musk could easily justify going to cartoonish lengths to destroy a person’s career on a whim. In his case, his reasoning is a consequence of the corruptive effects of too much power for anyone to possess.

Changing one’s job was much easier when we had a thriving middle class and various job options outside the structured and incestuous corporate world. Job options have become severely limited throughout the last several decades, in which one’s only choice for a stable career has mostly become a choice of serving as a cog in a multinational organization while hoping restructuring efforts don’t result in it vanishing overnight — like what happened with Twitter when Musk fired most of his staff on a whim.

Musk’s latest attempts at accessing the personal data of three hundred and fifty million Americans are precisely for controlling their lives by leveraging their histories against them. Our choices in working for leaders we don’t like are becoming increasingly restricted to either that or homelessness and destitution. That’s not much of a choice.

If this nonsense continues, no one will be free to do anything without his oversight and the oversight of a fascist oligarchy.

What political ideology is socially progressive?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What political ideology is socially progressive but still capitalist?”

People are socially progressive or regressive, not ideologies.

Ideologies are wrappers around the contents of similarly aligned people who share a common set of values, beliefs, and ideas for how political processes occur and how commonly beneficial goals are achieved by working together.

Ideologies are not static entities like moulds that immediately shape a person’s thoughts once inducted into an ideological grouping.

Ideologies are dynamic and ever-changing as people change. Here is an example of how much an ideology can change:

(For the “fake news people,” here is a link to the Snopes article giving this platform a rating of “mixture” — 1956 Republican Platform )

Regardless of the accuracy of the above platform, it’s pretty clear by the Project 2025 platform that it has significantly evolved.

People define and shape ideologies, not the other way around.

Today’s Republicans are not Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation championing Republicans.
Today’s Democrats are not the Dixie Democrats of less than one hundred years ago.

Liberalism has undergone many varied manifestations as if it were Christianity, endlessly spawning new denominations.

This question, however, flips that script around and becomes something pretending to be an ideology but is, in fact, something much uglier and evil. This question presents an ideology as if it were a costume to wear in a performance following a script dictated to members like a cult.

Ideologies are also not capitalist. People are participants in an economic system referred to as “Capitalism. Each person views aspects of Capitalism that align with or run contrary to their politics. Since economics comprises a core component of political systems, varying interpretations of Capitalism’s’ role in society also form a core component of alignment with an ideological identity.

In short, almost all political ideologies incorporate interpretations of Capitalism within their ideological construct. Hence, you have answers extolling varying ideologies that all claim to be capitalist.

Like religions, however, each pretends to represent the “one true God (of Capitalism).”

If one were willing to stretch the definition of Capitalism beyond its commonly accepted uses, then even Communism could be considered a “capitalist ideology” because capital is essentially a store of value directed toward creating infrastructure for facilitating trade. Communist systems conduct trade within their systems.

After having said that and freaking out some hard-core capitalists, let’s track backwards and identify the typical distinction between Capitalism and “not capitalism.” That definition hinges on ownership of the means of production. In Capitalism, ownership of factories is held by private entities. In a communist economy, factories (production environments) are owned “by the people.”

Ironically, however, an argument often used to extol the benefits of Capitalism is the ability of the people to buy into a capitalist venture through a process called “share ownership.” Functionally, this renders the distinction between Capitalism as we perceive it and Communism as it was conceived as moot.

Communism failed because centralized authority was unable to meet the needs of the people. Capitalism is undergoing a late stage that is rapidly descending into failure for the same reason of consolidated power and centralized authorities.

The only salient differences between the two systems are how power is distributed and who is conferred power by what process that conferring of power occurs.

In summary, we would be far better off focusing on power instead of worrying about ideologies and which one wishes to identify with as their favourite team. We should be far more concerned with who has power in society and how much power they have.

If we genuinely want to live in a free society that we typically call a “democracy,” then we desperately need to adopt an ideology which “worships the flattening of power.” We must adhere to principles in which power is spread like peanut butter to all people.

The only power that truly matters in life is the power to choose how to live it.

Freedom is living one’s life in a state of maximum opportunity and diversity of choice within a shared environment. A critical factor in the success of an ideology is the acknowledgement of how we are all in this together. Only together can we survive into a future that lasts even half as long as the dinosaurs did.

Was there a defining moment that led you to become a feminist?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Was there a defining moment that led you to become a feminist, and if so, what was it?”

Before I begin with my answer to this question, I’d like to include a quote from Dr. Ernest Adams’ (https://www.quora.com/profile/Ernest-1329/)  — answer to a question defining feminism  —  (https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-feminist-exactly-I-have-never-been-able-to-understand-exactly-what-that-entails-The-terms-definition-seems-to-float-somewhere-between-reality-and-personal-definition-of-reality-or-just-plain-ridiculousness/answer/Ernest-1329):

Feminism seeks to obtain equal rights, privileges and opportunities for women; to improve their lives and living conditions, particularly with respect to problems that are unique to them; to produce equal outcomes of these policies such that they have similar levels of power, wealth, influence and respect to those enjoyed by men; and to change social attitudes that are hostile, derogatory, oppressive, or tend to interfere with any of the foregoing.

The funny thing about my upbringing is that I should have turned out to be a misogynist.

All the elements were there.

Under-Educated Community? — Check

The average education in the town of about seventy thousand I grew up in was grade nine. The primary employers in the area were forest industry operations. One could afford a comfortable lifestyle with a mortgage and two-point-five kids on a mind-numbing daily routine.

Toxic Masculinity Within My Family and Throughout My Community? — Check

“Be a man” was a daily slogan one would hear everywhere in almost every context, but it wasn’t in the refuge of my art class where one of my instructors was flaming, but I didn’t realize it then. Hell, I didn’t realize that about him until I visited the ol’ stomping grounds years after graduation, and I wondered why it seemed he was lusting after me.

Practically everywhere else, though, including my own family, there was no shortage of advice on how to put women in their place and no shortage of shame hurled in one’s direction if they showed “weak emotions” like compassion.

A Panoply of Bigotries Everywhere? — Check

There was always a reason to crap on different genders, different skin colours, different hairstyles, different clothing styles. One acquaintance who listened to the Beach Boys morning, day, and night would give you a sideways glance if you listened to anything else. From his perspective, something was wrong with you if you liked Reggae.

Manly Men Doing Manly Things Everywhere? — Check

If you couldn’t name every part in your car while stripping it down to nuts and bolts while doing your oil change and then reassembling it for fun, there was something wrong with you. You weren’t a man if you couldn’t work on your vehicle at minus twenty below weather.

Hanging Out Car Windows While Wolf-Whistling at Every Woman Walking Down the Street? — Check.

Boys believed the girls went for that sort of behaviour and were butch if they didn’t. Even the girls in that environment were more masculine than any male in the school band, and they could drink one dozen of them under the table without a bathroom break.

Somehow, though, I never thought of women as either inferior or superior or anything beyond being just people. They smelled nicer, and some could appreciate sensitivity, but you had to be careful who you displayed it to because most would think something was wrong with you.

I didn’t realize I was a feminist until well past my thirties. I still don’t think about it unless it comes up in conversation, and I have to remember that I somehow reacted against the toxic masculinity in ways that made me one.

I think that’s one of the things that bullies don’t quite get. Every person they bully in life learns to hate everything they embody, and so growing up in an environment rife with toxic masculinity has taught me to hate machismo on such a level that I am now in a position of putting my life at risk with the police because they have bullied me to such a degree that I’m barely hanging onto my life by a thread. I’ve been adamant in conveying to them that I will not shut up and die quietly so as not to disturb their reverie because I am only beginning to rage against their destruction of my light publicly.

Feminism is equality, and even though men take the lion’s share of the blame for abuses, it doesn’t mean all are guilty of being abusive bullies. Women can also be assholes on levels equal to men as well.

Feminism simply asserts that we are all people, while the idiots on social media who never shut up about the evils of feminism are screaming their toxicity to the world. They are like MAGAts wearing warning labels in the form of red caps to identify themselves as toxic. Every male who whines about feminism is admitting to the world that they’re a toxic misogynist.

As prevalent as misogyny may still seem to be, it gives me hope to see popular media represent changes in society that remind me how glacial our social evolution is. It may seem imperceptible from the perspective of an individual life. Still, we are maturing as a species — no matter how much temporary regressions of our values may challenge our ability to maintain hope for a better future.

Why did Colin Powell defect from his old political party?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Colin-Powell-defect-from-his-old-political-party/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

This question represents a severe disability in one’s comprehension of a democracy.

It’s an attitude very much like what Elon Musk displayed when he thought suing advertisers for abandoning his increasingly Nazified platform was justifiable.

It would be like walking past a McDonald’s restaurant and getting fined for not stopping in for a burger and fries or not agreeing to make an additional purchase after being prompted by their upselling suggestions.

Imagine being charged double on your meal because you didn’t want to pay extra for a hot steaming pile of sugar called a “pie.” This cartoon scenario represents the same level and quality of entitled thinking in this question.

No one is obligated to go along with their party in a democracy. Being a political party member is not indentured servitude unless you have no self-respect or ability to think for yourself. You are admitting to your willingness to accept life as a baby bird whose mouth yawns open to await the trickle-down meal of mental stimulation to determine how and what you should think.

How is that a democracy in your mind?

It’s not.

How is that not a grotesque degree of abdication of your free exercise of will?

It’s a betrayal of everything we have had the luxury of enjoying because our forefathers sacrificed their lives fighting for and dying for the right to dissent from their party.

Anyone who steps away from a party is sending the most potent message possible that that party no longer represents their best interests.

The last thing anyone owes a political party is their loyalty.

Genuinely considering oneself a patriot who loves and is dedicated to freedom means protecting one’s integrity and family, friends, and community by walking away from a corrupt party. That’s not a defection but a courageous act of patriotism.

As terrible a VP as Mike Pence can be considered, he at least redeemed himself by showing the courage of a true patriot with a love of country.

Colin Powell may have royally screwed up while serving in the Bush administration, but he is not a defector. Colin Powell represents one of the most loyal patriots the Republican party has had in decades.

If your party cannot put the needs of the many above the desires of the few, then your loyalty to your country demands you to walk away from them.

Yes… that line was a direct ripoff of a very familiar source of inspiration for what defines us as humans. Even you must be able to recognize a universal truth in whatever form you encounter it. You cannot be a human who cares about creating the best world for all of us without acknowledging universal truths.

If your party no longer works to represent your best interests, then the only way you can be a freedom-loving patriot is to turn your back on that party.

If you think that people who walk away from their party are being disloyal, then that makes you disloyal to everything you claim to believe in and value.

If you can’t support a party member’s right to walk away, then that makes you a fascist.

If a party expects loyalty to whatever platform it concocts, then they are not a party that values democracy or freedom.

It is the party that must conform to the demands of their people. It is the party that must permanently relinquish power to serve the needs of its people properly. It is up to the party to adjust its platform to acknowledge what the people want and need. It is up to the party to represent their people, not vice versa.

The thinking embodied within this question is the core of the rot that makes an American style of democracy so vulnerable to enemies foreign and domestic.

If you genuinely want to fight for and protect your democracy as a patriot, then you must fight against a two-party hegemony.

You should demand complete electoral reform to eliminate the kind of corrupt thinking this question represents. It’s abhorrent that people have reduced a public dialogue into a mindless cheerleading competition.

The only people who win that game are the nation’s enemies who seek to usurp its power.

You should consider people like Colin Powell and Liz Cheney among the bravest members of your party because they are not afraid of the consequences of sacrificing their political influence and benefits for ideals that transcend petty politics.

The kind of thinking which embodies this question is what created concentration camps and gas chambers less than one hundred years ago.

This kind of thinking has been responsible for repeating that ugly history, and it’s already at the stage of recreating concentration camps.

How much further must we venture into this nightmare before people realize the horror they invite as a stain on their person and the burden of profound regret they will carry to their graves?

What could be the reasons people experience stagnation?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “What could be the main reasons some people experience stagnation, even if they aren’t lazy?”

Trauma and burnout are immensely impacting causes of inertia in one’s life. Burnout often precedes depression, and severe trauma can result in Executive Dysfunction. Depression can be debilitating, and Executive Dysfunction is scary AF.

Imagine waking up daily with a laundry list of activities you sincerely want to do, but your “round-to-it” never makes it off the couch for some indiscernible reason. “Yeah, yeah, yeah — I’ll get around to it.”

Weeks later… that five-minute job of daily housecleaning is a prohibitive three-day adventure you decide is no longer worth the effort. It’s better to return to doing nothing while thinking, “Tomorrow’s another miserable day when it can be done.”

Loss of hope for one’s future is a terrible thing to experience that can lead to all sorts of ugly and tragic outcomes. Restoring hope is the fastest way to cure one’s depression and worse.

Our economic dystopia is the main culprit of many of our social ills today, and it’s leading us down a dark road just like it did last century when it gave rise to fascism and the Nazi scourge to ignite a global war.

It’s mind-boggling to me that both the victims and perpetrators of this centuries-long class war so easily overlook such a prominent issue that it never seems to stop being waged against the little people.

It’s harrowing to realize how conceptually straightforward it is to avoid chaos and how impossible it is in practice to prevent it.

There is something so intoxicating about having power that people think of themselves as insulated from all the harm they do to countless others with impunity.

The worst thing about Trump, for example, isn’t the damage he’s doing with his decisions and actions. That he can continue wreaking havoc while he should, by all forms of reason that claim to value the concept of justice, be rotting behind bars right now — that causes us all the most harm. His freedom is the grossest of violations of the social contract imaginable.

His freedom confirms that there is no value in decency, integrity, honesty, trust, or responsibility. His freedom is an encouragement of every rotten behaviour and attitude imaginable by humans. It’s a veritable permission to be our worst selves. His freedom is a purge of our humanity.

Why TF should anyone think they have a future if that future means having to become a grotesque monster who is willing to destroy lives to get some money for themselves?

When push comes to shove, I doubt few people would trade having a loving family and being surrounded by a community of people who care for you as a person for a gold toilet.

Since that’s the world we live in today, that’s deeply depressing. What kind of person can believe a hopeful future awaits at the top of a garbage heap? It certainly isn’t the best of humanity.

It’s the kind of world most decent human beings don’t want to live in. With that in mind, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that birth rates are plummeting because what decent human being wants to tell their kid to learn how to manage their plastic intake enough to minimize the health risks it poses while admitting they did as little as they could to prevent this shit from getting worse.

“Yes, kids… I decided not to vote because I didn’t care enough to know the difference between parties and just decided to believe they’re all the same, so I said fuckem, let them turn this world into a shithole for my kids.”

In short, the main reason people are experiencing stagnation is the same reason they experienced it during the fall of communism as a system of governance. We are failing ourselves because we are failing to demand better from our leadership instead of holding their feet to the fire. After all, that requires risking one’s perks and benefits in life; w may as well let them do whatever they want so that we can complain about how shitty things are and be able to say, “I told you so.” when it all turns to shit.

In shorter and more famous words:

How can we determine the truth about the existence of God?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can we determine the truth about the existence of God? Should we rely on the beliefs of atheists or believers?”

This question is heartbreaking.

There is not a single thing in your life that you struggle with determining whether that thing exists other than your desire to believe what other humans have told you is true.

No other human has ever had to tell you the sun exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you mountains exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you oceans exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you cold viruses exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you snow exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself.

Nothing other than supernatural nonsense puts you into a quandary of wondering whether it exists or not.

You might wish to believe ghosts exist but will never see or experience tangible evidence to support any belief because no evidence exists. The same applies to goblins, leprechauns, fairies, angels, demons, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. All of these imaginary beings are products of fiction, in which you will never experience a real-life manifestation of any of them.

It’s not that no one has been looking — quite the contrary. Millions worldwide have been searching for evidence of these phenomena for centuries. There have been television programs for decades with teams of people equipped with the most modern technologies to help them find evidence.

Let’s contrast that against something that was theorized to exist in 1964. A particle officially referred to as the “Higgs Boson” was determined to exist by extrapolating from the evidence that showed a massive gap in our understanding that could only be explained by something the public became aware of as “The God Particle.”

It was named so, not because it bore any relationship to your magical sky daddy, but because it was difficult to find. A physicist by the name of Leon Lederman wrote a book in 1993 called “The Goddamn Particle,” which was an expression of frustration over how difficult it was to find.

Everything about physics on this scale showed that it had to exist, but it couldn’t be found.

It was finally discovered forty-eight years after theorizing that this particle must exist to explain how mass is transferred to other particles like electrons and quarks. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland gave us the first proof of its existence. We had no tangible evidence of its existence up until then. We did, however, have tangible evidence of its necessity to exist to explain other phenomena that could not otherwise be explained without it.

IOW, without the existence of the Higgs Boson, much of physics would have just broken down into a jumble that could not make sense, be adequately explained, or avoid being relegated to the same realms of the imagination that the supernatural exists.

Without tangible evidence of its existence, all scientific discovery was at risk of being viewed in the same terms as magic — inexplicable woo.

Physicists set out to find it according to the clues pointing to where it must exist, and that’s where it was found.

No such corollary exists with the god concept.

Nothing in the universe requires god as an answer to an unanswered question.

The only reason you and everyone else who struggles with the concept are hung up on it is that it appeals to your emotional need for the universe to make sense in a paternalistic way… in the very same way, life made sense to you as an infant in the cradle whose parents or guardians ensured you had food in your belly. Life made sense to you as an infant when your diapers were changed to keep you comfortable and warm each day.

Your yearning for God is the desire of an infant wistfully hoping the chaos of life makes sense on some level beyond your comprehension… and that may very well be the case, but it isn’t due to some magical parent who will care for you like an infant in a cradle.

Atheists have no beliefs about god, so turning to atheists to answer questions that are your responsibility to answer for yourself is a disservice to you.

Other believers will tell you what they are desperate to believe is true, while atheists will tell you they don’t believe that nonsense.

This atheist will tell you that if something like a god creature exists, it doesn’t exist in any form that any human has been capable of imagining. Our universe is too vast, alien, and too far beyond human comprehension for us to have the slightest hope of untangling its mysteries enough to know anything with any certainty.

This atheist will also say that every manifestation of god by humans is an extension of their egos and represents the epitome of delusional human arrogance.

This atheist will strongly recommend that you stop wasting your valuable intellect on pining for a cosmic super daddy of the imagination and focus it on trying to detangle the complexity of life on Earth. There is already plenty here for us to figure out on our own, wasting valuable time and effort in pining on something irrelevant to the physical reality we share.

Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a Father Cosmos is an abdication of your agency. It is a way of giving up on your gift of free will that you would expect someone to dictate your life to you instead of rising to the challenge of living your own life. It is a way of running away and hiding from the freedom you have been given, which has been hard-fought and won through bloody sacrifice after sacrifice throughout history for you to benefit from.

Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a magical authority is giving up on yourself and retreating into a darkness of slavery and hopelessness in an existence of oppression made worse by the fact that you would only be serving the most depraved humans on the planet who don’t care in the least about a god beyond how they weaponize that concept against you and steal your life from you to benefit themselves.

This atheist strongly encourages you to live your life for yourself and not for some fantasy peddled to you by a parasite who wants you to believe nonsense because it benefits them at your expense.

How does art as personal expression differ from societal values?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How does the function of art as a means of personal expression differ from its role as a reflection of cultural and societal values?”

We are each of us mirrors of our cultural and societal values.

Each of us expresses our values as we have been exposed to and have absorbed them into our makeup as individuals, whether we do so through work defined as “art” by society or by other means of self-expression.

Some common ways we recognize different cultures include dialects, cuisine, wardrobe, rituals, and social activities such as special occasions, holidays, and celebrations of varying kinds.

We typically define “art” as an experience without a pragmatic application beyond conveying an emotional or intellectual concept.

Most forms of expression serve a pragmatic value, such as organizing people, educating people, helping people accomplish goals, or restraining, hurting, preventing, or prohibiting people from engaging in an undesirable action.

The purpose of art is purely to share perspectives while the artist in society focuses their attention and development precisely upon developing one’s perspective through their work.

Most people rely on their expressions as a secondary, supportive, and functional concern as an adjunct to whatever their primary occupation is for their attention.

Everyone expresses their cultural and social values by being unique products of their environment. The artist “enters a meta state” of introspection while analyzing values to convey them through their unique perspectives.

Like physicists who focus on the physical characteristics of the universe, medical professionals who focus on the biological characteristics of humanity, psychologists who focus on the mental states of humanity, and geologists who focus on the mineral characteristics of the planet, artists focus on our cultural expressions of the human condition.

Artists are professional analysts for our societies who reflect the varying states of humanity through their expressions.