9.23.20
For truth to be truth it must have a universal dimension to it, yes?
To be acutely aware of artifice, not simply to avoid it, but command it as an author, is art. Arriving to your own truth requires owning ones own delusions—hence the importance of vulnerability in producing good art.
To clarify, vulnerability does not mean a selfish expression of ones impassioned state—attempting to transmit ones exquisite pains or pleasures—for the heights of ones emotions clouds clarity. Vulnerability is a state of allowing—which might be the only true control we have.
With bad art, the sensitive viewer will perceive the attempts to control the medium as contrivances—for desire becomes odorous as the desired result is what was impressed in the medium. A greater or lesser awareness of artifice allows for articulation of this detection, but control itself is always able to be sensed by the sensitive person, as control is always a deviation from nature.
It is sensitivity that is a communing with nature—the natural state of any mediations between you and reality—that provides for a relationship with any universal dimension of truth.
Our own nature being our relationship with nature, which is what is fundamentally intimate*, before the learned experiences of pleasure and pain construct our contrivances. Therefore, it is always healing that gives clarity and sensitivity.
We must allow ourselves constantly to be regenerative, to be generative, to be creative—to heal and be healed. Good art is this practice.
* Ancient mystery schools and contemporary art institutions are oriented around this primordial intimacy, as indoctrinations to esoteric paradigms, because it is both proximity to reality and profundity of intimacy that is being taught by experience alone.
Addendum:
The etymology of ‘conviction’ comes from "state of being convinced one has acted in opposition to conscience, admonition of the conscience".
In discerning good and bad art, conviction is the same. We must be able to discern good and bad conscious, to have any meaningful and just society, yes?
In art, conscious is applied to any mediation between ourself and what is beyond us—whereas in moral judgement, conscious is applied to what is beyond us by mediation.
In both bad and good art, or bad and good behavior—discernment is made by an empathic sensitivity to intention.