{"id":16338,"date":"2021-06-04T10:30:39","date_gmt":"2021-06-04T08:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/?post_type=stsp_text&#038;p=16338"},"modified":"2021-06-18T12:39:25","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T10:39:25","slug":"art-is-dead-long-live-art","status":"publish","type":"stsp_text","link":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/text\/art-is-dead-long-live-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Is Dead \u2013 Long Live Art"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Die einen haben eine Muse<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Die andere eine M\u00fccke<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Life in the city entails a more limited spectrum of creepy-crawlies than are found in the country but still, I don\u2019t need to go far to find a bug in Berlin. Mosquitos, flies \u2013 large and small \u2013 bees, wasps, and ladybugs all fly into my living room from the balcony. The doors are flung wide open in the summer; I can understand the temptation. Most of the time, I can just let them be. They want to look around a bit, sniff the scene and check things out. There\u2019s no need to get involved at first, but if they get too loud and obnoxious, I will address them, saying, \u201cYou\u2019ve seen enough. You can leave the way you came.\u201d Usually, they see themselves out, but their presence pulls me out of my inward-facing projects and musings, away from the omnipresent screen to which I am glued all day. I am reminded of the world beyond my four walls and open again to new impulses and ideas. At first, what appears to me as a pure annoyance, even fright or disgust \u2013 depending upon the insect \u2013 ends in creative activity.<\/p>\n<p>The majority of the life cycle of a mosquito passes unseen by the human eye. Underwater, underground, under production \u2013 we only notice the mosquito when it reaches its final adult stage in all its buzzing, blood-sucking grandeur. The mosquito is visible but remains hard to catch. Even heavy with our blood, they have a knack for slipping away, sideways.<\/p>\n<p>I have often wondered how these bugs survive and procreate if they have no human blood to feed upon. But it is only the female who requires a tiny drop of mammalian blood to lay her eggs. Mosquitos use thermal, olfactory, and visual cues to find sources of life, that is, human blood. We are part of their life cycle.<\/p>\n<p>Ticks are also heat-sensing and leap off of stems of grass towards the warmth of passing limbs belonging to humans and animals. The ticks of North America are a revolting wonder to behold. After a long walk in the fields or woods, you must check your clothing and person, lest you become dinner for one of these parasitic arachnids. Carefully pulling such a pest out of one\u2019s flesh, burrowed in deep and swollen up to two hundred times its original weight on your blood, that is an experience not easily forgotten.<\/p>\n<p>Some bugs have a lifespan of merely weeks, such as flies, others stretch into many years, like spiders and insects. The most fascinating example is the periodical cicada in eastern North America. These true bugs spend nearly two decades underground in their nymph phase, only to emerge in the billions in 13 and 17-year cycles to mate, lay eggs and then die. The eggs fall into the earth and slowly grow for another 13-17 years. 2021 is the year that a 17-year cycle of cicadas emerges in April, and it will be a doozy. This is resurrection in its purest form \u2013 never actually deceased, just hidden from our view.<\/p>\n<p>It is the ladybug beetle that my eye naturally seeks out, and my heart rejoices when she appears. The tiny ladybug usually arrives on a solo flight to my apartment. Perhaps she is lost and separated from her friends? Or maybe she is a brave adventurer, coming all the way up to my fourth-floor window. Once a ladybug egg has hatched, in its first incarnation it appears as a helpful larva, eating aphids that destroy garden plants. Then the remarkable ladybug will molt four times in its pupa stage, shedding its skin and undergoing total transformation into full beetle adulthood after two weeks. The final step is known as the imaginal phase, and a newly born ladybug is known as an imago, from the Latin word for image. This familiar red and black dotted imago is what inspires us. And anything that inspires will inevitably fall prey to the powers of commercialization.<\/p>\n<p>And so, it is unsurprising that bugs are now beheld for their commercial potential: The new ersatz protein. Bugs will save the planet! Eat bugs, not meat. Rainforests will survive because someday, the food industry will find a way to convince more people to eat bugs, instead of animals. I have my doubts, but the bug-protein market is rumored to already be worth $1 billion.<\/p>\n<p>I heard that scientists are working on micro-drones that are shaped like dragonflies and have the aerodynamics of mosquito wings. They will have many potential uses; one allegedly beneficent purpose will be looking for signs of human life and finding victims in collapsed buildings. But with small cameras placed on mini-drones that look like bugs, who\u2019s to say these robot-beetles will enhance our lives? Technology doesn\u2019t have a good track record of being used <em>only<\/em> to improve the human condition.<\/p>\n<p>Viewing insects, however, only in terms of their utilitarian function and\/or their potential for commercialization or inspiration for the frontiers of technology misses the original \u201c<em>Dasseinsgrund\u201d<\/em> of a bug: being part of nature and the created world, one that lives and manifests in cyclical metamorphosis. Even if we rarely appreciate each stage of the cycle, much like my admitted preference for the ladybug imago, a bug exists as part of its whole natural context.<\/p>\n<p>Caution is advised when signing death certificates for art or anything from the natural world \u2013 without looking closely to determine which stage of metamorphosis is occurring. Cultural renewal is also a gradual and cyclical process. Much of art takes many incarnations to manifest in the open, to be ready to inspire as imago for the masses. For art arises from the space between the interaction of the mind\u2019s consciousness with the outside world. This is not enough though, as my perceptions of the world are prone to distortion and error. I need another mind with which to commune, bounce things off of, and to collaborate with. The fructification of an encounter with the world and my fellow humans may be followed by years of gestation. We humans may exist as machines on some levels, but we only truly thrive as creators. Widen the lens of our focus out far enough and we see: there is no final product, no drone or dinner plate of cicadas to consume, there is only continual collaboration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Die einen haben eine Muse Die andere eine M\u00fccke Life in the city entails a more limited spectrum of creepy-crawlies than are found in the country but still, I don\u2019t need to go far to find a bug in Berlin. Mosquitos, flies \u2013 large and small \u2013 bees, wasps, and ladybugs all fly into my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":16179,"template":"","categories":[44,12],"class_list":["post-16338","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-18","category-non-fiction"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Art Is Dead \u2013 Long Live Art - stadtsprachen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/text\/art-is-dead-long-live-art\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale:alternate\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Art Is Dead \u2013 Long Live Art - stadtsprachen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Die einen haben eine Muse Die andere eine M\u00fccke Life in the city entails a more limited spectrum of creepy-crawlies than are found in the country but still, I don\u2019t need to go far to find a bug in Berlin. 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