The Agony of Influence

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
-Ecclesiastes

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
-W.B.Yeats



If you strip your work of ideology - like a good Formalist (who's ideology is embedded in the material like a wood nymph) - you will find yourself dealing in abstraction - units, quantity, qualities (but not quality per se - it's ideological) .

Abstraction is not ideological, then, except as a way of life or an instrument.

In the financial world, abstractions are bundled with abstractions, new ways of structuring money; mathematicians sculpting numbers.

But why? To play the game? To extract revenge? To escape mortality? Sheer beauty?

Man is not so easily drained of blood as to deal merely in abstraction.

But what of the young artist, or even old, who declares their work to be deserving of a decidedly theoretical place in history, with its abstract taxonomies, its pruning of untidy branches, its essential, but contingent truths?

Many artists know the dirty truth - that there is nothing new under the sun - that there is only quality - newer, older, bigger, more.

Artists who colonize the past, a culture, or their peers, must come to grips with the necessity of quotation - the ineluctable press of thousands of ideas piled high in an eternal harvest.

But surely there must be a direction, if not an embodiment of the second coming?

And I say unto you:

He who is under-capitalized reaps the bitterest fruit.