Surrealists make of DG CONNECT the fools that they are

Still continuing with the time theme, and very much related to that which I wrote about last week …

Before me is a copy of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, published in 1924 and authored by André Breton, the writer who founded Surrealism. And what do I read?

"But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretence of civilisation and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices."

And this not only hints at the deep rooted cultural weaknesses of the Western (Europeanised) world, but well summarises too, DG CONNECT and much of what is (there are of course exceptions), the extremely noisy, highly schizophrenic circus that goes by several names: STARTS, STEAM, SEAD and probably several more as time moves on.

Oh vainglorious Enlightened ones, you weave narratives that speak of deficits, among which sits lack of creativity as one of many. Thus your fragmented and reductive minds, caught-up in strange notions of being rational and objective and basing decisions on so-called evidence (which seems mostly to be the means by which you reinforce your cognitive biases), construct your own reality made from the sum of simple problems befitting simple solutions; and then you do conspire among yourselves to appropriate art for the purpose of eliminating this one specific and imagined deficit, while arts' great figures of the past, make of you, the fools that you are, for unlike Breton, you have not yet even a glimpse of what the problems are and that you are but the manifestation of these problems, and that includes many artists too …

DG CONNECT had the power to choose and they chose wrongly. How does it feel knowing that by the time you do eventually understand, people who are not part of your Enlightened Europeanised world will have exploited your deep rooted cultural weaknesses and it will be too late? It has already happened once before, yet who among you know of this?

Oh dear, and I am only just getting warmed-up, for there are many more blogs about DG CONNECT and its instrumentalisation of artists to come …

Next week the Tale of the Director General’s New Clothes.