1: “less time to actively engage with larger subjects… means a lot of the work continues in the background.” I may put a little more stock in this than is warranted, but I tend to believe in the cliché that a lot of our best work solving problems occurs when we’re not confronting them head on, with all of our attention. The old chestnut among, I guess, the post-Freud modernists who thought you could resolve puzzles by spending all day not thinking about them, going to bed, and in the morning the answer would be waiting in your brain for you, a gift from some kind of helper-app in your unconscious mind. So I have this idea that even when I’m just going through the motions and making these semi-automatic collages, there is still some kind of learning/thinking process going on unconsciously which, when re-engaged with, will illuminate me to something.

2: “how dumb art is as a concept” is probably what you actually wanted elaborated, right? I was just using it as a lame example of a “larger subject” (unresolved) on which I might otherwise be expending energy. And it is something I’ve been thinking about a lot: that our current concept of “art” has brought us to a certain place, and perhaps it’s time to abandon the idea of “art” if we’re going to move beyond this place. In fact, I wrote a response to this so long that I gave it its own post.

Thank you for giving me an excuse to think more and write about this, which I never would have done on a Saturday afternoon.

“it seems like less time to actively engage with larger subjects (like how dumb art is as a concept) means a lot of the work continues in the background”

can you elaborate on this?

ps:
From where I’m sitting, this all seems completely diegetic.