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Is Struggle the quintessential art expression? Eh, probably. We’d simply call the contemporary visual artist, a trickster [for the most part] if our culture were more folkloric or mythological. And as you can imagine, the trickster has a somewhat difficult role with the emotional arduousness of living with social shame caused by disobeying normal rules and/or conventional behavior. But thanks to feedback-loop-logic, the trickster is only inspired by such social condemnation and thus pushes more emphatically against the walls of its boundaries. Thus, we can simply say that restraint begets creativity [i.e. Matthew Barney] because we say that creativity solves problems [and creates them at times when there are none for the problem solving entity to assimilate and transform].

Case in Point: China, and the Chinese Art Market boom.
Where as some of the market boom in China may seem like the precursory surface glam of “The Great Recession,” there is an undercurrent intending to tip the unbalanced level of psychic trauma caused by the mnemonic generation’s* relationship to the last 60 years [and many more] of dictatorship. The New York Times has a brilliant video called Forbidden Art in China that undeniably illustrates this point.

Unfortunately, the only comparable ‘collective’ restraint placed upon American creativity is Capitalism and its economy [which is closely linked to religiosity]. With that said, it’s rather strange that art which takes that thread of collective meaning as a basis for its process is commonly reduced to a superficial hologram of the political dynamics which occurred during the 60′s and 70′s. Or, perhaps that’s the misfortune of the baby boomer generation, which is primarily responsible for those dynamics during that period and also primarily holds the majority of teaching positions within creative education, as they continue to refuse their inability to return to the discomfort of systemic confrontation. Hence the cliché of concern.

[*'mnemonic generation' is the term I'm giving to the generation of individuals that has the furthest claim of interpersonal/public memory. If there is an actual term for this, please tell me what it is in the comments for this post.]

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