Every empire

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

— Edward Said

And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?

When you say ‘This work has nothing to do with me.’ When you say 'This work is boring/pointless/obscure/elitist etc’ you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginitive experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of the daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I’ that we are.

A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?

― Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery 

The world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available

We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks. But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.

— Richard Foreman, Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater.