Pick your favorite placebo…

Your last is an important post, John, and gets at the heart of what we mean by Placebo Art. American’s especially want desperately to live in a world in which art is unnecessary. This is because art is all about asking questions that have no easy answer, and America was founded on the notion (hope? delusion?) that finally we would get it right and paradise would manifest in the here and now. So it isn’t that Americans hate art - more that they are profoundly ambivalent about art and artists. And the expression of that ambivalence is the DOMESTICATED artist. This is the person with some “talent” but no real commitment to art; a person lacking in integrity from an artistic perspective who is eager to participate in the fraud for the sake of ambition and convenience. Also useful is the utterly FRAUDULENT artist - a person without talent or integrity who is willing to impersonate an artist out of, perhaps, a cooperative, quasi-patriotic impulse, recognizing how desperate the culture is to avoid any form of self-recognition.

It’s important to see past our own sense of outrage about this and shed light on what’s at stake and what the specific stratagems the culture deploys in order to neutralize the transformative (i.e. de-stabilizing) potential of art. For me, again, art in the West has been the vehicle for presenting to people a mode of being radically in opposition to the Calvinist technocracy of Capitalism, which itself must be understood as essentially religious in nature. In this technocracy, the purpose of life is to accumulate as much evidence of God’s approval as possible, and this evidence takes the from of money (capital) that should be horded rather than used. This sounds crude and primitive…and it IS crude and primitive, and in the grip of this crude and primitive drive human beings are reducing this rare gem of a planet to a smoking cinder revolving lifelessly through the void of space. This crude and primitive drive is quite adroit at concealing its true nature, and one of the many ways it does this is by snuffing out those tiny little cells called artists that generate a little luminance.

Now, fortunately for the mindset described above, artists are quite easy to manipulate and neutralize because artists are generally people who were, on one level or another, traumatized early on. Their “luminance” is a response to some early wound that marked them also as reactive, needy, over-emotional and generally quite crazy. They can be turned against each other with the greatest of ease; with a few words they will fly at each other’s throats, thundering indictments at each other. The demands of creating art also mean they tend to be tightly focused in their view of the world, and hence naive and easily manipulated, conned, ripped off and generally bewildered. Also, they are endlessly vulnerable because the wound they work to heal can never really be healed so all you have to do is ignore them for a while and they’re own inner disappointment will bring them low.

But of course the prelates of the crude and primitive theocracy I described above are even MORE pathetic than your average artist. They too, if they had the fortitude to examine the matter, were created out of a first wound. The self, in all cases, is the result of trauma - the trauma of separation from the mother, finally. The trauma of that first experience of the “unresponsive other” when the infant recognizes its utter vulnerability in an unknowable and exceedingly threatening world. Refuge is taken in a self-definition that is forever at odds with what is actually taking place, and this self-definition is endlessly tinkered with and fixed and polished and added to and re-jiggered forever after…but it can never really be fixed. Even more so than the artist, the prelates and technocrats are stumbling forward through the dark, toiling endlessly, for example, through their one and only youth to join the ranks of some profession precisely in order to forestall their sense of not really living at all. Not really living, not really being present to their actual experience because they are lost in that endless tinkering with the self in order to fabricate what can never be fabricated.

No offense to these people, really, but this is what we call the human condition, and our troubles in the West have to do with embracing crude and primitive solutions to the basic problem. In the grip of our delusions we suppress awareness and pretty soon we find ourselves electing crude and primitive men like George W. Bush to positions of immense power…and soon after we do this a historical cataclysm takes place…and then we are too distracted to focus on keeping the artists at bay…and so the quality of art improves…and we have a little luminance - a renaissance such as that which took place between the last two world wars…or such as took place between the Tudor wars and the Reformation in England…or the actual Renaissance in Italy, fertilized by endless bloodshed…In such times people are not so entranced by placebo art - they demand the real thing and we get Shakespeare and Leonardo rather than (pick your favorite placebo). Hey, I love Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky as much as the next aesthete, but given the price in innocent blood, I too would rather live in a world where great art did not need to be created.

Guy Zimmerman

PS: Anyone interested in purchasing the new anthology can find it at Amazon here -