For I feared you, because you are an austere man. You collect what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.
A very popular story this mid-winter involves homelessness, a young single mother, imperialist state repression, a baby born to poverty, bling from the east, angelic choral embellishments and the solid smell of warm beasts – sheep, cows, donkey.
And she brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
These victims of austerity and ethno-racial discrimination join millions of others in mythic and living narratives as the austere men, who reap what they do not sow and collect what they do not deposit, continue to wreak casino-capitalist havoc across the world.
Where, then, is beauty?
as subtler aesthetic shifts changed what we think of as normal.
The idea of aesthetics goes deeper than appearance; it also covers what things feel like, meaning that taste and sentiment come into play too.
Boom and bust economic practices blatantly use 'bust' to drive citizens further and further into austerity so soon after the boom during which
property porn became a staple,
spectacle replaced soul, and sometimes also substituted itself for meaning,
as the world fell foul of
a global money-making juggernaut, glittering yet rootless.
The new normal is all austerity, never prosperity, relentlessly never fairness, with a
bigger-must-be-better mentality
leading to perverse notions about money, worth and value, where
money and celebrity has cast a shadow over the art world which is prohibiting ideas and debate.
Boom aesthetics gave rise to the lie that you have to pay huge salaries to get people to work in certain industries, that those salaries reflect their worth as individuals and that money is the only way to give people the respect of their peers.
Where are the new stories in such a world?
As the worlds of art and literature demonstrate, people will find a way to do what they love to do. They also show how an influx of money can skew things and how making the rewards solely fiscal impoverishes everything.
Is it possible to create new stories? Is it possible to give birth to new economics, that do not blast, boom and bust citizens?
It would be interesting to construct an alternative model based on the economics of arts organisations, small festivals, arts collectives, community projects and creative co-operatives. It might not save the world, but it might remind us that what has come to stand for normal is, like flares, only a fashion.
The passion for creation – new birth/nativity – is aesthetic. And economic. Oscar Wilde, never austere, knew that
in nations as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it will be sure to waste its strength.
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
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