Painting the Dao

35 Notes 1 Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy is a recent western form of the same idea, but as a rule earlier western approaches to the authentic mysticism involved (as opposed to its occult reflections) have been subverted by socio-cultural belief in anthropomorphised deities. My forthcoming book Driven Sane deals with these ideas in greater depth. 2 This also goes for any other domain where there remains a conflict between interpre- tations. We now know that the earth is not flat, that the universe is not terracentric, and that the earth is a minor planet at the edge of one of billions upon billions of galaxies, so conflicts that arose out of earlier false beliefs have evaporated. But cosmology, along with other aspects of the scientific domain, still rests on conflicting opinion and is not yet entirely free of dissent, just a great deal more free, and less dangerously so, than the domain of religion, or even the political application of philosophy. 3 Its most recent iteration was published as Art Reboot: A transcultural re-evaluation of the nature and purpose of art that finds in China’s ancient past the resolution of global confusion in the modern art world (Hong Kong: OM Publishing, 2023), a rewrite of the earlier volume, The Art of Understanding Art: A New Perspective (London: Profile Books, 2015). I also publish, free to view, a growing number of essays on art and consciousness on my website transculturalink.com . 4 As I edit this, it occurs to me that there is an extraordinary correlation between Banksy’s response to his own art and the ancient Chinese ink-painting tradition. Any owner of a painting with sufficient confidence as an aesthetic contributor felt free to add to the original a response in elegant graffiti, possibly on the mount, or on additional paper added to the end of a handscroll. Collectors also regularly added their seals directly onto the original painting, resulting in major early works with a blizzard of vermilion affirm- ations of appreciation. The conventional western mind finds this vandalistic, because the object is sacrosanct rather than the process. With the process sacrosanct, any addition has positive potential to evolve consciousness. The original work of art may be altered, but for a higher purpose. I have no idea what Banksy had in mind when he came up with the remarkably creative concept, but it transformed a repetitive, albeit significant, image into a unique work of communication. It also doubled its market value at the press of a remote control. That would certainly have tickled his well-demonstrated contempt for the conventional, materialistic focus of the art world. I issue an open invitation to Banksy to contact me. He’s welcome to pop round to the studio wearing a balaclava and hazmat suit. I’ll still tell him to come back later if I happen to be busy writing an encomium on a fourteenth-century handscroll by Ni Zan. 5 Hardly surprisingly, given that for the first half of the twentieth century revolution was a way of life towards a future utopia – as so often, more realisable in theory than in prac- tice. External revolution can never bring about utopia, though internal revolution might eventually achieve it. 6 In the twentieth century in the West, while the Mona Lisa was revered, and was prob- ably the most valuable art object in the world, it was still irrelevant in terms of its aesthetic focus. To make it relevant, modern artists had to add a moustache! Ah, Marcel Duchamp again; where would we be without him? 7 There are several records of artists producing similar works to the abstract expressionists more than a thousand years ago in China, but they were the exception rather than the rule, as the urge to such surface abstraction was already satisfied by abstraction within depiction. Overleaf ak24.75 134