We Call It Art

-- This is an attempt at sounding Russian. --

There is no art here. There is only catering. Food brought out and placed on giant tables. Food filled with fatness and gluttony, tucked into the folds and the crevasses of plates already stacked to the brim with it. This food is what we’re being served. We’re being stuffed with ignorance and pleasant nourishment. As soon as we clear our plates, we forget what we’ve eaten. We gobble it all up and then it’s gone, and even our dirty plates can’t remember what it was that we just ingested. That is what we call art. Plates scraped clean because the food on it fails to satisfy us. And what do we do? Do we demand better? Do we say that though things may be hard—rather, because things are hard, we should make ourselves hard? We should make ourselves smarter? We should enrich our lives as best we can rather than take our minds and train them to accept lesser things in greater quantities? I don’t understand this way of thinking. I don’t understand why we don’t just stop altogether. Have the table cleared, sit and look at each other, and try to determine where we went wrong, and whether or not we should start over. That, at least, would be better than what we’re doing now. We’re calling our garbage “art.” We fail at achieving the real thing, so we take anything, and we call it art.