The Nature of Art: In Our World

KEEPING SISYPHUS HAPPY Camus believes that, for the artist, remaining aloof has always been possible in history until the present moment. Now, the uncommitted artist is unthinkable. Everyone must now be pressed into service and must bend to the oars; for we are on the high seas and the artist must come off the sidelines into the amphitheatre with the lions and the martyrs to relieve humankind of oppression. The question is who are the slavedrivers and who is steering the boat? -Ron Price with thanks to Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay, Cornell UP, London, 1983, pp.217-218. Whatever form the world commonwealth takes, its creation will represent a new stage in an evolutionary process that began over 100 years ago or with the League of Nations. The process is evolutionary rather than some miraculous, new creation descending from the sky, ex cathedra. It will not be totally detached from the past and the present of international organizational forms and processes. -Brian D. Lepard, “From League of Nations To World Commonwealth”, Emergence: Dimensions of a New World Order, editor Charles Lerche, Baha’i Pub. Trust, London, 1991, p.96. A treacherous superficiality do I see in this lighted box, false community, McLuhan’s cool medium, indefinable shaper, alterer of my world, no necessary barbarism, decadence in some electronic theodicy, psychic distance created or eclipsed, producing anomie bewilderment, without a centre, just more and more and more, never ending until my last hour, in these antideluvian days that are fast becoming the deluge, the new Dark Age and it is getting harder to imagine Sisyphus as happy.1 1 Reference to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man who spent his life rolling a rock up a hill and having it always roll down again—and again and again. The key, Camus said, is that one must imagine Sisyphus as happy. Ron Price 16 March 1997 1 Albert Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus as happy as he rolls a rock continuously up hill until it falls down again and he must repeat the process.