Episode 5: Jake

This conversation tackles head-on what art is meant to do. Jake takes issue with the recent 75 years or so of visual art, particularly since Conceptual art of the 60s or 70s. Traditionally art is, according to Jake’s view, soteriological. Now, literally, this means to give us comfort, to make us feel better.  One often thinks of this in traditional kinds of religion, particularly ancient Hindu or Buddhism. The release from pain, release from anxiety, release from the wheel of life. The problem, for Jake, was that art has abandoned this goal and become part of a secular, consumer world doesn’t satisfy those natural instincts to go to another world. Consumerism doesn’t do anything but give a sugar rush.

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