From: Gary Fields ID: M05398
Date: 12/6/2019 10:13:42 AM EST Letter ID: 694781157
Location: 401
Housing: F4203 L

Prompt: What does your art look like?
(www.exchange-for-change.org)

"30 years of chaos and turmoil under the Borgias in Italy produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. While 500 years of peace in Switzerland produced the Cuckoo Clock"

We're living in an age where the Trump has sounded and a panderer's box of hate has caused chaos, conflict, and polarization. My art could look like a Bill Board, Bumper Sticker, or a Blurb on the back of a book as long as it consisted of words that could be used as sledge hammers of truth in a world of "alternative facts".

50 years ago, Arthur Hayes Solzburger, Publisher of The New York Times, said, "A man's judgement can only be as good as the information upon which he has based it... Give him no news, or present to him only with distorted or incomplete data, wit ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process and make him something less than a man."

I wonder what Arthur would think if he saw the "paid pundits" that pose as broadcast journalists. What would he think of today's talk radio where sophists pander to "ditto heads" in trailer parks, while commanding 400 million dollar contracts. What would he think of Facebook's algorithms that use data mining to create echo chambers where people wind up wrapping the bitter facts of life into bandages of self illusion or Tech giants that create platforms to not only present those illusions as alternative facts, but exchange them at the speed of light?

My art could look like crypto-hebraic hieroglyphics, or the scratching of an epileptic chicken on crack-- as long as those words could be used as scalpels that slice through the "skin of the truth" that people wrap around their body of lies, then I would be satisfied.

Out of chaos comes opportunity, and each time I turn on the Evening News, I see new opportunities to practice my art. Anyone who can make you believe absurdities, an[d] make you commit atrocities. I will continue to use my art of writing to explore the truth, and challenge the absurd role that echo chambers play in our lives, before those atrocities are committed.
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Gary S. Field