Postscript:
We've been asked to clarify our position on a number of points. In order to do so, here, in this postscript we'll drop the tone of a manifesto. Faith, no doubt, comes before reason; but doctrines themselves are hollow without understanding. Even if our first goal is belief, it lies mainly in the power of reason to convince.
First, what is the position of the non-artist in regard to ART? It goes without saying that not all people feel the inner demand to create; artists, it's argued, are born not made. Moreover, even if the artist can be made, what power do we presume to convince a mature adult that ART is as important to them as every budding teenage poet, spontaneous actor, or painter driven by some ineffable impulse of the soul?
We argue that the ART is significant equally to the artists themselves, as to the rest of us, who merely need structure to life. The beauty of an ART conceived as a metaphysical grounding for life is that even non-artists contribute to the foundation by the very ability of all people to sustain culture. To take the example, again, of the church—on the one hand, there are the clergy whose job it is to promulgate the idea; on the other hand, there are the laity, a portion of whom engage directly with the idea, in philosophy and art; lastly, there is another portion of the mass who engage indirectly with the idea as they live a life structured by the shared idea itself. Our scheme does not demand that all people create art, only ART through their collective understanding.
We come to this position faced with the powerlessness of the majority to confront the conditions of their own lives. Even the most impoverished, disadvantaged men and women, understand their lives in terms of capitalism, which offers the promise of success freely, but real success only rarely. Life is conceived only in terms of the necessity to play the game, to make enough money to subsist. Bread and butter issues come first, but these issues are only understood in terms of the dominant ideology. Success in general implies capitalist success; or spiritual individual success, which eases the unrest of the soul, but cannot confront the causes of the unrest itself. In the face of this, there is little possibility of directly confronting the economic situation, which puts the wants of the rich before the needs of the poor, if only because the poor have ceased to recognize what it is that they need.
In this analysis, we are indebted to Gramsci's analysis of ideology. Consider the example of a young girl, born to a poor white family in the middle of nowhere, Appalachia. She's smart, does well in school. By the miracle of financial aid, she gains admittance to Harvard, where she studies economics, in order to get ahead; she moves on to Harvard Business School, gets her MBA and ends up the CEO of a start-up, becoming quite wealthy in the process. This is success. Her parents are entirely supportive; back at home, still living amid blatant poverty, they can talk about nothing but her daughter's achievements. According to the Marxist analysis, this young girl is acting directly against her class interests; by rights, she, smart, capable, should be leading the struggle against the very system that keeps her family, her friends, her neighbors in poverty. Instead, through the workings of the dominant culture, success has been defined for her as capitalist success; the desires of the proletariat are culturally determined by capital, so that the dominant mode of production holds power both in terms of wealth and productive capability, but also in terms of minds, both of CEOs and our young girl's family back home.
Our hope, in the face of this cultural brainwashing, is not to fight it with violence, with material appropriation, or material revolution, but instead with culture itself. ART, as the new metaphysical grounding of a culture, provides an Other removed from capitalist ideology. But showing everyone, not just artists, that life can be elsewhere, ART can orient people away from success as capitalist success, and push them towards the realization that life is more than capitalist life. By the very unveiling of a new way out, the totalizing nature of ideological illusion is broken. ART itself is well equipped by its nature to provide this new path towards salvation; the salvation provided by ART is not the salvation of religion which promises safe haven in the next world, but a salvation which is freely available in this world to all who wish it. ART promises a foundation for the very creations of human beings; for those who do not create, by revealing this foundation, it allows for the dominant system of thought, planted in their minds, to be shattered, and the foundation of capitalism itself is called into question. ART as such, is that which is out there, yet present; it provides a definition of success, both individual and collective, which challenges the dominant notion of success for both those who engage ART directly, and for those, still admirably, may live now in a world where a choice becomes visible, where only a definite answer was apparent before, according to the thought-system of capitalism.
The worship of ART is like the worship of any false god; but this new god we worship is a god of our conscious creation, that, we believe, provides an answer to life that meets the requirements of real human needs—the need for respect, the need to experience, the need to value, the need to express, the need for a larger collective, the need for a secret plan, the need for hope, the need for an alternative to a way of life that is predetermined. ART has no pretensions towards changing directly our material conditions. Rather, ART is the means by which we shatter the dominant ideology, so that a new kind of success is at last possible.
The next question concerns our methods, for in order to enact the grounding of a new culture, more than a small vanguard is necessary. How to we plan to advertise our ART? The first stage is all we can speak of at present. Perhaps we start with children. It is in childhood that our first culture codes are shared; who, in their twenties today, doesn't remember the Nickelodeon line-up, the obsessive collecting of Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering cards, building highways for Hot Wheel's, eating Fruit-By-The-Foot, and drinking Capri-Suns, all while wearing mood rings, promise bracelets, humming the Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears? Imagine in place of these corporate intrusions, we handed out ART MOVEMENT charms, bracelets, t-shirts, baseball caps? What if the cards the kids traded tomorrow didn't bear the image of fictional commodities, but works of art? What if instead of 151 Pokemon, one needed to collect up the very pieces of art which form the basis of our new metaphysics? What if the very future ART of our creation took the form of a grand game, the game as ART, in which children, in the end, discover the hidden treasure, the great secret of which we speak: that the secret is ART.
For now, this is all we can say as to our methods. But the other secret of our operation is this: that we are always working, since we realize our lives are nothing without ART. We will have ART cells in every city; our meetings will be general; we will be behind every corner, under every rock. We have nothing else to live for.