by Thomas Keyes
Fine Art is always having a crisis or a revolution of some sort or another, and very few of them are of any real interest. Every now and then society has a crisis or a revolution or just a good old war to shake things up, but in the grand scheme of things the direction very rarely changes, and anomalies, if not eliminated, remain impotent alternatives - tolerated, maybe even admired, but certainly not adopted. What happens less often is that society and Fine Art have a crisis at the same time; this is usually interesting and has produced great art, noble visions and true attempts at revolution. However, the Achilles heel of Fine Art has been its dependence on the civilization that gave birth to it, and the addiction to which this civilization is enslaved - energy. No matter how noble the cause or grand the vision since the agricultural revolution and through every revolution since, society has, when the dust settled, arranged itself in forms to extract more energy from its environment, with culture tending to reflect and celebrate this perceived progress. What has not happened before is what is happening now: we can no longer dig ourselves out of this hole by digging faster. There’s nowhere left to exploit and, for the first time ever, we have to account for our actions as a species on a global scale. Everything that gave us comfort on the post-modern gravy train - technology, cheap energy, capitalism - now seems threatening and devoid of meaning. This journey never had a destination but only now, as we near the end of the line at increasing speed, do we recognise this and begin to panic. Whatever happens next will be more than interesting.
The Transition movement is the only serious attempt to deal with impending results of thousands of years of resource mismanagement by this and previous civilizations. The context is new: oil and GHG’s are recent, but there have always been those who sensed that something wasn’t quite right, and it is their shoulders that those who seek the Transition vision are standing on.
