Thoughts On Art Of The Disenfranchised

When artists are so unceremoniously forced into seclusions by unprecedented events such as global pandemics, their craft suffers or experiences vast metamorphoses, and we are left to wonder what art will they table before a strange and mutated world?

If these are truly the last days of what is normal, then it follows that all norms should transform, thereby developing to mirror a transforming world. And as we look optimistically to this age of reclusive introspection, exhibited on digital platforms by creative in cages of quarantined lives, we also must wonder about the substance of this new art ‘out of the norm’. 

Will art then, be relegated to the margins of social conscience, become an art from the disenfranchised, art that reels in muddy cages of contemporary social disarray; will this art exists in compromised digital clouds of a collective global library?

This lament is but a manifesto for a breed simmering in test-tubes on neo-culturalism festering in eradicated individuality? Are we going to become the masked, faceless exhibitors of commercialized personalities, altered by dis-ease, and experimenting with our souls on binary canvases?

Will a plethora of works be projections of disenfranchisement, isolation and deleterious urges for long abandoned freedoms? Those admirably forlorn regions of the mind, will they imbue our crafts with depth and tragedy?

Should this art be a record of atrocities and derailed marathons of routine; are we to conjure a language to alter almanacs of our soon to be eternal concentration camp?

Or is there room for rosy hopes in that landscape drawn with blood and viruses, boundaries carved in laboratories by quarantine zones? Are we to redesign humility as everyone copes with the spurts of their chosen paths? Will our art be a rotted rejection of all destinations representing our dimming hopes or will it speak still of previous lives, episodes postponed in an overwhelming decadence of a bored society?

Reminiscent of crumbling masonry, we watch ideas of a manicured future fray like leaflets of slogans we sold ourselves.

Suspended cravings of closeness have abandoned us, and we stand transfixed at this station suspended in edited photographs. 

Will our art be a secret perpetration of self-immolation, snitching on friends and foes before coin machines dispensing memorabilia from a counterfeit global village? Will art root out the rot of soulful vibes howling from screens and pages of forbidden conspiracies?

Will any art of the disenfranchised mirror our terse commentary on this coded diary we keep of a time of death?

And as these pestilent times kill themselves with immortality in syringes and other ammunitions of self-effacement, will art be frank and calm as a priest during an execution?

Will we have witnesses to madness we toss about our walls and clay mounds, who would confirm that we truly had jumped out of windows to save ourselves and repulse tradition?

Or are we to join the flock with tongues sold for plates of elite consumers of soul-soaked paint and stone?