Painting the Dao

32 worked adequately as a first step in approaching creativity, but it doesn’t work in fully mature aesthetic cultures, and hasn’t in China for more than two millennia. In process aesthetics we ask, ‘Does my involvement with this act of creative communication deepen my understanding?’ This shift resolves all the outstanding questions that linger in the art world. A single example is all we need: consider Duchamp’s reoriented urinal of 1917. Widely dismissed as art for the better part of a century, it became recognised as one of the seminal artistic contributions of the revolution. Eventually we realised that the object itself was unimportant, other than for its shock value in gaining attention. The importance lay in the meaning of such an object; the object was the messenger, not the message. Once the message is understood, we don’t need to entertain the messenger. Fountain was comprehensively dismissed and nobody bothered to keep the original, not even Duchamp, who knew what it meant and that once the meaning was grasped the object became irrelevant. By establishing the primacy of the process of art over its objects, Duchamp was in the vanguard of real- ising the emancipation of creativity. That shift in understanding allows us to make sense of other widely misunderstood acts of creativity – a pile of bricks in the Tate Gallery, silent music, a shark in formaldehyde, Tracey’s bed, wrapped buildings, Banksy’s art-shredder, you name it. 4 Whether the art object is considered art or not becomes meaningless because that is no longer where the definition of art rests; it rests in the overall process. Far beyond the production of art objects, art in the broader sense of ‘any creative response to experience’ becomes a metalanguage in the evolution of consciousness. Its fruits are self-realisation and evolved consciousness, which, by extension to the collective, become civilisation. Another way of looking at this is that in the West art was a window on reality, whereas in China it was a window on the self. This difference in focus – the world outside and the world inside, both aspects of reality – indicates the fundamental and dichotomous purposes of art in the two cultures as they existed prior to the modern western revolution, since when western art has been emancipated and the rules that once governed have been discarded, though they linger still to our confusion. In the visual arts, ism by ism, we were left only with such rules as arose out of art. After thousands of years of servitude, western artists behaved like kids set loose in a sweet shop without walls and with infinite horizons. However, their inability to understand what they were really up to as revolutionaries led to an equal inability to judge when they had achieved their goal, leading to revolution’s negative legacy. The necessary novelty of revolution, replacing