Art

Art costs nothing and yet it can be scarce because 'you can't eat art', some say.

Materialistic schools of thought suggest that if you can't eat or hump something it is of no value. But it isn't like that. Again it is a matter of monopolizing what some consider to be powerful.

Wherever you travel to you are definitely going to find parallels between the amount of art and the amount of well being of the citizens of that place. Civilization, harmonious co-existence has always been linked to beauty, and chaos to ugliness. Ugliness is chaos in terms of aesthetics. If you threw random stuff all around your house that is what you would get --chaos, ugliness. And no matter how expensive that house was it would still look ugly and it would possibly make you feel pretty disturbed too.

The same principle could be applied by states if they weren't too busy counting their declining income to ever take notice; like one of 'our' self-appointed ministers here who apathetically stated that tourists like to visit Athens because it's a dump. Some of those guys managed to spend hundrends of billions in such a tiny country with little benefit to few; mostly so that some of them and their cronies could hoard hundrends of billions in Switzerland in my name, and so they'll be borrowing ad infinitum and make bankers happy. But they think that to invest a couple of millions in beautification would be an unecessary, luxurious expense. That could also be because the way they make business deals with other's money they'd have it cost two billions instead of millions. So, they'd rather hire some more bureucrats instead, in case there is any freelancer artists hidden somewhere and dodge insurances fees and taxes.

Too bad most professional artists are too poor to ever be considered VIPs, although they often are. Hollywood and the pop music industry have been very pop methods of influencing the thoughts of viewers and listeners, and that is why those artists as well as some other 'fine' artists who exhibit actual junk (boots, coca cola cans) in classy exhibitions are among the few that take any credit and make money. Credit is most often granted by 'experts' who are incapable of creating any art themselves. And they get busy chopping the heads of artists because they don't do art 'right'; as if there was any right way to create something beautiful.

Art is basically free and it's up to each one of us to create and to share it, even just for the sake of just doing it; and I enjoy so much to watch other's art. It's power is only beneficial. And regardless of apathetic, intellectual financial bubblings that only see inevitable doom, we all know the most admirable is the most valueble of all.

It isn't true that wealthy cities became pretty because of their wealth. It was their level of civilization at that time that made them wealthy --including their art. Unlike what some teach it all starts from within and it becomes expressed on the outside, and not the other way around. If the outside becomes your inside you'd better change that so you can be free, like you basically are anyway.

My tip: Pay zero attention to critics and just do it. The same is true for money and anything else good that you want to accomplish in your life. It might not be democrarically correct but it's freedom.