An interesting read by Clyde Rathbone:

A few days ago when my alarm woke me, the first thing I did was lovingly caress my the most treasured companion…my iPhone 6 Plus…I opened FB to learn about what cats where doing in the world….to see what kind of food my fellow primates were consuming, what television shows they were watching and to share in their life struggles….like being cut-off in traffic or “not being able to find a suitable hairdresser anywhere in Canberra!!! FML LOL…Sad-face”

Naturally, in a show of solidarity I was forced to like all of these updates as quickly as my thumb could tap the screen.

I then went on Twitter to have a nuanced debate about important global issues… to be berated and to berate all the people who disagree with me. I then visited CNN & the BBC…to learn what diabolically brilliant way some government or religion had devised to kill innocent people and divide humanity from itself.
But after that important work was done I went somewhere I’d never been before…just around the corner from my home I took a stroll to an art gallery in Deakin…There I met the disturbingly energetic and eccentric artist…Margaret Dimoff…Inside this huge building Margaret displayed an astonishingly large collection of paintings and sculptures, work that she has spent decades creating.

I asked Margaret why she creates art…and she looked at me in a funny way…as if to suggest I’d asked a truly peculiar question, and then she said:

“Because I have to”

That’s the point, isn’t it. That while the rest of us are wasting a way years of our life on the grey canvas of social media, people like Margaret are bursting out of bed with passion and inspiration roaring out from deep within them.

At the very moment we’re contemplating our next social media status update, someone, somewhere in the world, is writing a poem that will go on to produce a lump in our throat, or dancing in a way that makes the hairs on the back of our neck stand to attention, or giving birth to a piece of music that’s never been heard before, or sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night with an idea that just must be written or painted or sung or danced, or acted…because they have to.

Art isn’t square shapes in square buildings – I used to think of art that way.
Leo Tolstoy said:

“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.”

In this way Tolstoy reminds us that Art acts as a kind of cultural connective tissue…binding us all together by unearthing that which defines what it means to be human.

Art is a rage against the insignificance and impermanence of our existence. Author, Terry Pratchett, who died last week spoke to this when he wrote:

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”

Now I have to concede that art…as tiny ripples on a vast cosmic ocean…could in fact be a waste of time…maybe all we have is poetry, and dancing, and music, and painting, and reading and writing, and films and theatre….and lumps in our throat and beats in our chest….maybe it’s all a waste of time….I think it probably is….but what a wonderful, awe inspiring, beautiful waste of time.