Art: Our Great Escape

I recently volunteered to be one of the judges for a teen poetry contest sponsored by the Dallas Public Library. One of my top selections was a poem entitled, "My Great Escape." The author describes that whenever she wants to leave the noisy life of the city, she escapes into a book. Books offer her a great escape from her life.

The more I think about her poem, the more I realize that most of us use various forms of art to escape, as well. Film, television, literature, painting, music, video games. We spend half our day at work attending to the mundane activities of our jobs--activities that may have once been new, exciting and promising, but now feel routine, necessary and empty.

And the second half of our days are spent escaping. We read James Patterson's newest thriller; we tune into American Idol auditions or new episodes of Lost; we play our favorite video games on our new PS3s; we watch the movies Netflix sent from our queue; we listen to music and drink a beer. And once we're relaxed enough, we go to bed and start the whole process over again.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with these forms of art. After all, art imitates life and there is plenty to learn about life through art. It's not the little picture that concerns me. It's the big picture. The one we can't step far enough away from our lives for long enough to see. But be cautious. Though art imitates life, it is no substitute for life.

We live in an escapist culture where escaping through art is so embedded in our culture and so necessary to the system in which we live, that it has become an unquestioned norm. I think there was a time when art was the voice of revolutionaries. A voice that caused riots and action. But now art has been seized upon by the system to function as a means to its end. But art is no longer the shot gun for revolution.

Art is a medium in which revolutionary thought can be expressed to the appeasement of the artist and absorbed to satisfy its audience with no real action necessary.

Art is our escape from the half of our lives we spend performing tasks like robots. It allows us to experience things we may never experience. But it is a deceptive and temporary release from our realities. A release that only rejuvenates us enough to get up the next morning and keep doing what we do without question.

This blog sort of functions in a similar capacity. If it weren't for the illusion of expression and reception of thought this blog provides me, I may actually be doing something, rather than just writing about it. In that sense the blog successfully subdues any revolutionary or controversial thoughts I have. Thoughts that could lead to action if not safely and quietly channeled into something else.

Call me naive and idealistic, even call me crazy, but I don't want to escape my life through art while the rest of my time is spent feeding into a system that depends on me living a meaningless and robotic life. I want to physically go out and experience a life I don't need to escape. A life no art can imitate.