Painting the Dao

25 transcultural i st mani festo T he long-term inevitabi l ity of globalisation, and the con- comitant increased sophistication of theoretical understanding, will make the future of whatever we include in the domain of art transcultural. All local socio-cultural or nationalistic art-historical concerns will be trans- cended by a global creativity that will be free to find inspiration – material, psychological or aesthetic – from any and all cultures, past or present, in order to evolve. Ideally it will do so free of all existing value prejudices, and will be free to appropriate whatever is deemed worthy of attention without opprobrium. Transculturalism finds an appropriate analogy in water, which falls and streams to form rivers, each with a name and topography, arriving finally at this or that sea or ocean and becoming one indivisible body of water, albeit one we name in parts. Evaporation perpetuates the cycle. In this analogy, transculturalism is the world ocean, an indivisible crea- tivity whose individual sources are irrelevant to the future, being nothing more than a matter of cultural history. The water cycle represents both the confluence of local cultural creative response into transcultural creative response, and the evolution of transcultural creativity itself. Transculturalism is an overarching perspective that allows prejudice- free creative focus on any lower-level concerns, even prejudice. It has no rules that govern it, only those that arise out of it. ak24.93 138–9 Overleaf ak9.20 68–9