There is art in my Ego

The simple maternal truth

Today I read some article in the newspaper about the artist Damien Hirst, who’s last solo exhibition sold out completely in the total sum of 110 million pounds – yeah, around the neighborhood of a quarter of a billion dollars, with a B. “Nice, not bad” I thought to myself. I gave the newspaper to my mom and asked her to read this article. I came back after some time and asked her of what she had thought. She said that she cannot even begin to understand all these art things, and how it is possible to pay such amounts for art and what it is about it anyway that’s worth so much money.

Mission of interests

And you know what, she’s right about that one. It can’t be that art is worth so much money, but that’s not relevant. To begin with, let’s just say that marketing can be infinite and raise the value of a certain unique product accordingly, persistently and constantly, but that’s not relevant either. What is relevant is what I feel about it. and what do I feel about it? He can and therefore, so can I.
I am an artist, although I still have innate doubts concerning that matter. I am cut out for this, all my advantages and skills accumulate and flow into the best utilization when I engage in creating art, I have something new to bring to the world and I know how to bring it. But that’s not enough.

I don’t believe in art as a missionary engagement – it is nonsense. I think that an artist that truly sees himself as a missionary is a self-righteous fool at the least, and I say this particularly as an artist who conveys the deepest spiritual message in most of his works, but that does not mean that along with that I am not interested in selling each of them for a million dollars at least. There is essence in my art – I stand behind it and I would like for people to understand it and receive something from it, but that does not contradict the fact that I am here to make money, or on a more basic level, to serve my interests.

The prophet of wealth

Yes, I want to be rich and famous, esteemed and welcomed. I want to live well and to cushion myself from the harsh sensations of the life of poverty and hardship and the trouble of the incessant chase for the next nickel, as my mom have all her life. I would give the world to compensate her for having to live the hard life that she has lived, I would do the best to do what God didn’t, in her case. That’s who I am, these forces of fear and craving are strong and there is nothing I can do about it more than I already do. So I might as well admit it, express it and consolidate it, so that I can first realize these wills and enjoy the fruits and afterward get truly liberated from them.

Ordained mammal

Now you might say that this contradicts, but let me assure you: it does not. And why? Because experience is absolute in the eyes of the subjective – me. And I’m telling you that this is what I feel; my spirit is deep and it manifests in my works, but it is of no more depths than the ones of my shallowness – these are different venues of the same depths, the same spirit. I embody spiritual awareness and the striving for reality, no more than I crave for fame and yearn for fortune. It’s only natural, trust me.

You can pretend to be a Buddha or you can really be one. But if you really want to become a Buddha, you first have to admit that you are currently not one and that you have to start working on that.
I am a spiritual person, but part of my spirituality is the corporeality within which this spirit resides and which manifests all the spirit’s base and vulgar desires. I yearn for the light, but probably not more than I am drawn to darkness. This will also change…

Injecting awareness, projecting profit

Anyway, brass tacks, we all know that there is nothing in this world that is really worth so much money, not art and not anything else. You project your self value, the worth by which you estimate yourself onto your work of art and that becomes its value.
The value of a work of art is the amount of time, energy and spirit invested into it – to what extent you are truly yourself and how much of that self is absorbed into your work of art and constitutes it? To what extent is your self of spiritual awareness imbued into your work and resurrects it into being?

From there naturally arises the question of what is the value of the human spirit? A million? Ten million? In Dollars? In pounds? No. the potential of value is infinite and what translates the human spirit into money is marketing.
One might open a restaurant or a boutique and the other might choose art as a profession and a way of life. And that’s also what I told my mom, I said to her: “I’m not even talking to you about art, mom, I’m talking business here”.