NEW DIRECTION

⚪️🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣⚫️ NEW DIRECTION Ed. No. 82 - - -

MONEY FIRST AND BUGGER THE REST MAKES A GREAT WORLD FLAT AGAIN

WHERE DID ALL THE ARTISTS GO?

Darlinghurst - Sydney's Ned Kelly?

Artist: Anonymous

Photograph by Neville Williams

There are still a few diehard artists floating around Darlinghurst.

Someone of character is doing a Banksy here by installing these eyes gazing through holes in the wall

in various locations around the Suburb.

An appropriate thought provoking message for us all.

So I am wondering what the status of the Arts and Artists generally is at this time?
Like much of the rest of life on the planet this too is under review by Artists themselves.

An artist friend who knows his way around the Art World was expressing recently that the artists had been pushed out of Darlinghurst, Sydney by the exorbitantly rising rents following COVID.

"Never a dull moment Darlinghurst" has changed. When I first moved in more than 35 years ago it was something of a bohemia not that it was a perfect world. (A wonderful example of this imperfection in the Art World can be viewed in the Coen Brother's feature film "Inside Llewyn Davis" or even Baz Luhrman’s“Moulin Rouge”). Oh the existential angst.

But the species of "Artist" feels to me to be coming somewhat extinct not only in Sydney's inner city but generally in the healthy mix of a world society. When I say artist I'm talking about those who have a DNA predisposed to actually saying something to touch or move us. Those who have a motivation to wake the life in us and keep the world turning.

Even artists though have fallen victim to the epidemic of money first and bugger the rest of, well, anything. And sure in a world driven by money if you are not participating in the rat race you are not keeping your head above water. We're out of balance and suffering because of it. How can you be creative (on any level) when you are constantly worried about money issues?

I mean this same artist I've been talking about was selling large artworks and helping to generate the oh so sanctified economy. Then post Covid his FOMO landlord put the rent up from $750 a week to a whopping $1,200 per week.

I wonder if this increase has actually made the landlord any happier?

The ego may be stroked for a few moments because the landlord is winning(?) but really happy? Nah!

So much fear so much unhappiness.

When there is no creativity in this world the dollar addicted can sit on their piles of money in their gold encrusted counting houses (a la J.P. Getty*) in the boring company solely of their complete and own generated misery and wonder why(?).

More is never enough to the addicted.

A little balance goes a long way.

But who's listening and who's talking anyway? Wrong choices does that to us.

Makes us narrow minded, prideful and self-righteous.

It is acknowledged that there are those such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who understand the word 'balance' and then there's ... the rest.

If humanity doesn't want to listen to what artists have to say then it is time for a '~~sea~~ see change'. - Neville ☺︎

* Thanks must go to those charged with disbursing
J.P. Getty's oil fortune majorly to the Arts.
(The feature film "All the Money in the World" can also be recommended
if you're interested in a story about being skinflint.)

Ned Kelly strikes again.