Maggie's Farm

--see the black circle up and slightly left? The concentric black and white circles? That's a 'bleak eye' motif --and to a personal viewer it could be your eye, and the rest of the picture could be how the inside of your consciousness feels when it is overloaded --say, on wakeup without coffee yet, or at bedtime with a day full of thoughts yet to assume some sort of form, after any hairy haywire dang thing or other has entered your mind.

So, i'd say, it's a snapshot of a state of mind. "But what isn't?" one might wonder. The answer might be, "Well, nothing isn't." And then there you are gazing at the picture having a universal experience, that of utter uniqueness and utter commonality at the same instant --as it is to be a person.

That's why he's a big hit --his art is 'optimistic' in what it grants as to the intrinsic value of a person --which is, as we all intuitively understand, always at question, and forever fragile in the glowering light of evil.

LOL --"Philistine sells poseur Brooklyn Bridge"

that has always been a mystery --you can find it in Gramsci's writings --or the Franfurt Schools --the direction to uglify art and and demoralize the western boojwah's confidence --but, how such fertile ground for such art --where did all the traditional politics artists go? One place is magazine covers --Norman Rockwell on the Saturday Evening Post, elder Wyeth in books and magazines and advertising --from whence they became not artists but mere ''illustrators''.

This would not have gotten so far along (Serrano and Finley, and Cristos pink-sheeted river valleys) if folks had just asked themselves who had done this rebranding, and how and why. It was just a few editors, but they brought bolshevik mountains to mohammed --and NYC/Chicago/Frisco, thus Everytown, USA.

--well it's soon to be a moot question. They --we --didn't mind it enough in the past but we do now, and either we shake it off the body politik (see tea party) or there won't be a body politik to shake anything off of.

...but isn't that the same as saying that one gains by fighting against one's enemy? Which in turn is to say that humans are in the human condition?

i think you're right --and that's why there's 'salvation' available --which works even without the supernatural --one can't feel 'saved' and still do others wrong --which is the problem of greed after all.