Be compassionate..always seek active kindness...Friends, the world is imaginary, only I am the real thing. The world of desire is full of tribulations, but learn to say after me, I'm lovin' it...
Robert Hughes was, perhaps, right after all to say with regard to Hopper that the frontier had moved inwards. Having pushed as far westward as possible the only logical place to go was inward. G.S.Wood makes the intriguing point that the frontier was fundamental to the establishment of politics: the constant expansion of it would prevent any one interest group from dominating and corruption-the plague of old Europe-would be avoided (of course, in practical terms the grim reality of inclusion was quite something else: The American blacks were 3/5 ths of a human being under the Constitution and the Red Man, well, he was not even considered human at all!).
[Joel Sternfeld..California]
This retreat inwards, the decline of the public world, is itself a result of capitalism and this was already well understood by those who saw modern commercial society engendering a passive citizenship to the detriment of the republican ideal. The move to a virtual, abstract reality, is directly mirrored by the the development of the disembedding and de-territorializing processes of globalisation.
It is not surprising, then, that there should be so much suspicion of the 'outside' world, full as it is of injustice and impersonal forces, deceptions and conspiracies or 'codes' to be unlocked. Only the self is real..a divine spark lost in an opaque universe. We live in a gnostic age, a therapeutic state, and our new god is warmth. Is this why there is so much psychobabble floating about and will modern communications like the Internet exacerbate this? Is it any wonder, then, that everyone wants to be a Buddha in suburbia?
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