Painting the Dao

30 and begin the aspirational and benign age of reacquired harmony, a chief obstacle being that the egoic self is inherently disinclined to entertain the necessary prerequisite for transcendence of rising above self-interest as a governing perspective. The rate of evolution is exponential. It took about ten billion years for the simplest life forms to appear, but only a further three billion for today’s extraordinary complexity of mind and its means of communication to evolve. The pace of technological development also accelerates, as each invention or discovery opens onto many others. To send a message from London to Beijing and receive a reply once took a year; today such com- munication is almost instantaneous. There are two problems with such acceleration of means. The first is that each watershed moment creates problems for conventional wisdom, particularly for entrenched intellect. The second is that we find it increas- ingly difficult to keep up with the meaning being explored by our acceler- ating means. Computing has become so advanced over the past decade that we now flirt with Artificial Intelligence to help us keep up. Any rapid leap forward in our means of communication is initially and inevitably accom- panied by angst and confusion. The art world is no different. Religion and science may be non-over- lapping magisteria in our search for meaning, but art – in our definition ‘any creative response to experience’ – overlaps with everything. That is why it is so important to us: in a world of turbulence, uncertainty and now existential danger, salvation rests entirely on our creativity. I set out to define an overarching theory of art that would work for any culture at any time, and found that the perspective of the resulting theory was applicable to our other main vehicles of evolving conscious- ness: religion, philosophy and science. In the course of this work I came to the conclusion that the modern western revolution in the arts had been globally misunderstood. Caught up in the excitement of the revolution, we lost sight of its purpose and of its fundamental achievements. It was also obvious that the tenets of that revolution, exported on the wings of hege- mony before we even began to understand them clearly ourselves, were both confusing and largely meaningless when applied to Chinese aesthetics. If we are to harness creativity in the face of existential threat, we must under- stand it clearly, and I don’t believe we do. 2 In the West, creative artists responded to the new horizons of fully emancipated aesthetics faster than art theorists, who focused on the isms and failed to recognise their underlying achievement. A revolution is against