Re: EXTROPIC ART: The Importance of Creativity

Kathryn Aegis (aegis@igc.apc.org)
Fri, 28 Feb 1997 15:50:30 +0000


Nadia:
>The laziness you speak of is rarely confronted in this forum <snip>

I thank Nadia for her comments, and would like to add that I am more
willing to pin the label of 'laziness' onto artists themselves rather
than those who have not yet begun an artistic exploration, partly
because I perceive an underlying fear of art (a mostly taught fear)
that creates barriers that the individual must decide to surmount.

But the artists themselves have no such excuse, and I am royally
tired of reading poetry that says nothing, of looking at sculpture
that has been thrown together, paintings that blend into the wall,
artists who are mostly concerned with who comes to their parties.
When a few brave literary editors decided to award a major poetry
prize to an unpublished young black man, you would have thought from
the ensuing uproar that they had threatened civilization itself.

And yet that event jolted me into a stronger realization that the
only way to overcome this inertia is to take the responsibility for
it on a personal level. If those editors felt the need to track down
someone in the Black Mountains of North Carolina to find writing that
Spoke, that to me was an indication that my own personal
disillusionment with the literary mill was no longer a sufficient
excuse, because I could have done the same in my own editorship. And
this may be my own take on the transhumanist art movement--it doesn't
matter how much talent one possesses in any particular type of art, the
important aspect is to utilize those skills to communicate to others
and to encourage others to do the same.

And I, for one, look forward to complete the dreary graduate school
papers so that I may get on with some transhumanist writing projects.
Stay tuned!

Kathryn Aegis