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ART IN THE OPEN 2000With no artists, where are the cafés, restaurants and pubs going to get that lifting spirit? IntroductionThese days anything that is done without any quantifiable effect on a financial output somewhere tends to get ignored, at best, and rejected, at worst, as not being relevant to today's society. 'Does it sell?' is a question that I have heard too many times. If criteria derived from such a question were, or had been applied to technological, social, economic, cultural and artistic development in the past, would we be where we are now? Any society that rejects the playfulness of imagination, in the arts and elsewhere, that cares only for the bottom line in an accounting book, that closes itself to the wildest dreams springing from an imagination open at full throttle, is a society that it slowly but surely committing suicide through a progressive and lethal process of impoverishment of the fertile cultural soil found under its feet. With no playfulness, with no challenge to the assumptions found in the social, economic, cultural and scientific substrata underlining the workings of our society, with no 'if's', are we not condemning ourselves to stay forever in a closed room with no windows, counting innumerable grains of sand from pile after pile. Yes, a fat bank account is healthy, but what if...? With no artists, where are the cafés, restaurants and pubs going to get that lifting spirit of constant improvement necessary for an economically healthy society? Art cannot be anything else but an open ended and multifaceted wild quest. Any attempt to tame the beast will kill it. Pablo Luis González, Hull 2000 This introduction was originally published in the catalogue for Art in the Open 2000, July 1999. Comment »
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