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RE: "Artists are failing to affect the power elites"
I love your idea of expressing political truths through art. I hadn't thought of it before and it seems silly to me now that I didn't. I'm relatively new to the reality of "the game"... that age-old game of greed being played out covertly in an overt sort of way. I'm not entirely sure "things are changing" more now than before I came to this knowledge, but it feels like it. I do have hope. I do see change happening. It's revealing the covert and that has to be the beginning of the end of those games. Perhaps you were ahead of your time before. Perhaps now is the time.
Hi thanks for the comment. Yeah Picasso once said: "Artists are either always ahead of their time or behind it". I have found this to be quite true. For example it took me ten years after the the band "The Smiths" spit up before I discovered what all the fuss was about. But with regards to creating art that expressed political truths I now know that I was for sure ahead of my time. However I would not say it was not intentionally. I was merely that I "notice" things and I have always had some "ability" to see possible consequences to; world events, changing social paradigms as well as arising technologies. And as such at the time I could only see we were all heading for a disaster and as member of the human race I felt I had a duty to at least try and warn people and as an artist it was I suppose natural to use art as the medium in which to try and get that message across. For example, one day in 1985 I phoned my bank and asked to speak with the bank manager. The woman, on the other end of the phone line asked for my bank number. Now the number she was referring to was obviously my bank account number but at the time I was horrified and reacted angrily. "Don´t you mean my name" I said. At that very moment it hit me that society was heading for a future where everyone will be ranked and judged by numbers. This would have dire consequences on many levels for in a world governed my numbers there are only two numbers that have any power. The first being "Number one". This prediction came true for gradually came the obsession with society became based on who is the number 1football player, who is the number 1 racing driver etc. And then we have the A b c and even d lists for actors and celebrities..this is just another form of being Number one. This idea of being number 1 also creates tremendous pressure to actually cheat in any given area of competition because being Number 2 is now meaningless thus you will do anything, in sport you might use drugs, in finance you might steal, swindle, blackmail. IN a world that only places a value on being Number 1 then it can almost force a decent person to do literally anything to be Number 1. The end justifies the means. The idea of having honor in playing fair is thus seen as being naive and thus all our moral base for society is sacrificed of the sake of this Number 1 concept. The second number that is important in a numbers based society is simply the biggest number you can think of that is written on your bank account. In other words having a shot load of money. All this future came to me in a flash at that very moment. 2 years later in 1987 I went to the cinema with my brother and watched "Wall St" and when I heard the now famous "Greed is good" speech by the character Gordon Gekko I saw this as a sign my prediction was coming true for in a numbers based society we will try to moralize the very concept. Today I can clearly see just how far this numbers based society has come. It horrifies me to see how people rank and rate themselves b y many FB friends they have or how many followers they have on twitter or how many "likes" they get on a FB post and so on. And look just how much algorithms rule our lives. And all this, and I mean all of it, began because of one invention. The computer. When banks began changing over from people doing the accounting to computers doing it, then it was the beginning of the end. We have all forgotten that we are human beings, we are far more than the sum of our genes and experiences. We are far more than a mere number but being a number is exactly what Government and corporations want us to be because when can they count us it is easier to control us. And one more thing, in a world governed by numbers it creates the perfect system for elitism. For if your bank account number is big enough or you are number 1 at something, then you can make yourself unaccountable to the law. And so this became my first political art work protesting against the banks and the idea of society being based on numbers. Looking at the world today my message and warning I failed miserably but my prediction was successful.