Is the Painting Elephant Stealing American Jobs?

If you watched the first ten seconds of the video and then thought I’d gone crazy and shut it off, GO back. It is one of the best videos ever! It is an exhibition somewhere in Britain from elephantfamily.org, who promotes awareness of Asian elephants as an endangered species. The artwork is great and the video is done very well.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with a friend. He is an artist and his work is on display @ Ideat Village in New Haven, CT, so we wandered through a bit of the festival. The highlight was hearing two musicians, both guitarists and a guy doing voodoo on a laptop with their sound equipment; it was beautiful. These guys were so talented.

They were playing outdoors but in a semi-enclosed space so the acoustics were great. As I listened to their wistful rage, it was bitter sweet to hear these young men play in earnest and with passion, to a crowd of, perhaps, twenty. I wondered if they’d ever have a larger audience; I guess what I really mean is that I wondered if an opportunity for their music and expression would ever be fully realized by them or any audience. If a musician plays his composition in the forest with no one else to hear it does it still have the same meaning for the artist? I think communicating your art is a big piece of the purpose.

Kurt Vonnegut made a point in one of his books that because of our technological society, we’re so connected that the village poet, the church choir singer, and the old wise men of the tribe no longer have a prominent, necessary place in our society. We have Jack Nicholson to play some great roles, so we don’t need the aspiring actor who lives down the road to do a thing, so he works at a hardware store and his dreams go the way old socks. How many Kurt Vonneguts does the world need when you can read Kurt Vonnegut for about $7 per paperback.

This leaves a disenfranchised group, creative with a need to dispel the talents that well up within…well thank God for blogging, you tube, and reality TV.