It is difficult
It is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack of
what is found there.
- william carlos williams
Look to the art that is being created today to see the future. Artists are the barometers of time – the recorders of history, the sensors of the present, and critically, the harbingers of the future.
When Picasso’s long awaited portrait of Gertrude Stein was finally unveiled and panned by a number of critics, one of them saying “that doesn’t look at all like Gertrude Stein”, the artist responded “Don’t worry, it will.”
In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog takes us spelunking on a 3-D peepshow into the sealed off Paleolithic Chauvet Caves in France to osmose the extant relics of the first human works of art. Contoured by the cavern’s natural relief and outcroppings, the 35,000 year old renderings of prehistoric horses and bison pound, snort and thunder, pulsing amid the dancing shadows. Upon personally experiencing the magic of these cosmic depictions, connecting to the beings that created them across the eons, an anthropologist asks “What if man had not been called homo sapiens but rather homo spiritualis?” Or homo ludens “man the player” as coined in the 1950’s by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga?