Nuthin was delivered

'Man,' writes Kafka in his diaries, 'cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, and at the same time that indestructible something as well as his trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him.' 

This, as you can see, is a big problem. 

But perhaps it helps explain why I feel I've been made something of a fool, that in all my years of looking at what I thought was art I was not looking at art at all.

All those years of attending gallery openings, keeping up, subscribing to Flash Art etc. etc. were wasted on an abstraction that gave me nothing, or at least very little, in return.

I believed the minimalists, the reductivists, the conceptualists, the appropriationists and their ilk knew something I didn't, were on to something I wasn't.

They don't and they weren't. I wanted to believe--and I did--but upon further reflection saw that the church was empty of spirit and that emptiness was a big part of what such art wanted me to see. Even Duchamp's claim that as a viewer I was as much a maker of the work of art felt hollow. (Looking at the Poussin's at the Met in 2008 was a turning point as well as a Giacometti or two at The Centre Pompidou and Smithson's Spiral Jetty).

Perhaps it's always been this way, this desire for art to be something it can't be and for us to see in others what we don't see in ourselves. Perhaps I wanted to see what wasn't there. Poor me, I'd hoped for a different outcome.

For his part, Kafka is like a court reporter of the soul, keeping track of the fabulous by means of the mundane. I'm currently reading The Castle and feeling well-fed by it.