not a god

I recently recieved in the mail a bumper sticker with the words www.replant.ca printed on it. With it came a canadian one dollar bill. If you're canadian, you'll know that canada hasn't had a one dollar bill in a long time. The whole experience might make an interesting story, but I'm not going to tell it.

Instead, I'm going to tell you why I am not a god. It all started three days ago, when I recieved in the mail a dvd I'd ordered from a brilliantly creative musician. Believe it or not, he's also a Christian. That's right, folks, you heard it here. He's a Christian, and he makes great, creative music. Go figure.

His name is Josh Garrels. That's not what's important to the story, either. What matters is that Josh writes music that is positive and uplifting and still good. This has forced me to think about myself as a painter, and to re-remember that I'm not a god.

See, round about the Enlightenment, philosophers got their grubby paws on painting, and painters started to think of themselves as geniuses (geneii?), the whom of which are basically the gods of humanism, a religion that owns the western world and argues that people are big piles of unactuated positive potential. Up until that time, painters were just craftsmen, like jewellers or carpenters.

Suddenly, painters became Painters, and started spelling lots of words (like ART) with capital letters. This was pretentious. Unfortunately, no one realized this and today you can buy a painting of a red square for nine million dollars.

Josh Garrels and a canadian one dollar bill have reminded me that I don't have to "buy it", so to speak. I don't have to sit here on my self-proclaimed pedestal and act all hoity-toity. As of this day, therefore, I (in my artistic capacity) am a craftsman. Sometimes I may say bright things and be thought smart. And if anyone wants, I'll paint them a red square and charge them enough money to sponsor a hundred thousand children. If I can help it, though, I'll no longer be pretentious. Because (to quote myself), "being pretentious is like pretending, only it's not any fun."