The world simply isn’t real — it is totally navigable and for the most part stable (brains can be operated on with constancy and stop signs regularly do good work) but under definitive pressure one couldn’t really say that life is real — as “reality” is different from owl to owl and from lawyer to lawyer. For us, the understanding of this sort of circumstantial relativism of reality is where “art” and art-making has profound importance.
Art is like an extreme ambiguity that gives respite from the overbearing realities and certainties of others. Take the totally compelling, somewhat dark, somewhat humorous output of artist Martin Maeller — let one of his inky urns usher you somewhere random. Is the resultant place fact-based? Are these mascara-black Delphic vessels measuring cups to mete out moral volumes? No; they are welcomely and totally abstruse, dark, and witty.
Art is like an extreme ambiguity that gives respite from the overbearing realities and certainties of others. Take the totally compelling, somewhat dark, somewhat humorous output of artist Martin Maeller — let one of his inky urns usher you somewhere random. Is the resultant place fact-based? Are these mascara-black Delphic vessels measuring cups to mete out moral volumes? No; they are welcomely and totally abstruse, dark, and witty.