Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply."
Walter Benjamin Self-determination, greatness, eternity. Make your reality and it becomes you. Put your heart and soul into what you love and others will recognize your sincerity, seek you out and reward your brilliance: from this comes greatness and glory, infinite and undeniable---a fraternity of the eternal. And yet with each successive epoch, the present greatness of our moment, our time, disintegrates and disperse---becomes the mere stepping stone, the quintessential prerequisite to a future heralded anew as "the great epoch of our time." We fight a impossible war for historical cultural supremacy, and we do so blindly and selfishly, determined to achieve that greatness that we know has not yet settled down with one generation immovable throughout time. Secretly we pity these past fetes of culture, assured that ours is the time, the moment of greatness, importance and ultimate historical worth. So our art morphs from what was once practiced at first as a matter matter of self-fulfillment, personal necessity and fraternal interchange & enjoyment to one of vein self-service & epic self-deceipt. When we continue to ignore the fact that art is no longer a social endeavor---that it no longer participates in and affects the real social changes occurring around us, it's vitality inextricably tied to our historical standing---and allow it to remain autonomous from the very real material conditions that, in no small measure, make up the entirety of our current existence, we willingly clear the path to our own irrelevance, soon to be remembered, at very best, as a shimmering piece of antiquity typical of the old world, one that once held a vital and vivacious beauty in it's moment, but nay, no longer, sentenced to the dungeon of the specialists of the past.
But, it is too late...for WE will soon become THEY... More