offense

Mexican poet César A. Cruz (might have) said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." Art is that thing that provokes us to see the world as an outsider would. To see ourselves as a stranger would.

Artists are agitators. Tyrants and theocrats detest art not sanctioned by orthodoxy or regime. It is because the words and paints and clays and melodies stir our spirits and invite us to imagine different worlds.

T.S. Eliot asks the theatre for "immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink." The artist's world is often a lonely one. Just as the alchemist takes great pains to transmute lead into gold, so too does the poet sacrifice much to turn suffering into art.

Jose Ortega y Gasset explains a sociological function of art. In the 1925 essay "The Dehumanization of Art," he demonstrates how modern art strips away recognizable human stories and deep personal feelings. It focuses purely on structure, color, and mechanics. This type of art, in particular, "divides the public into two classes," those who get it and those who don't. In that way, Ortega claims that real art is not easily likable and thus unpopular. It is offensive by its very nature. The capacity for discomfort is a symptom of real art's presence.

That said, I really don't like modern art. I find most of it uninspiring and even grotesque. Yet my taste is a product of my time and place. Modern art and its auxiliaries (brutalism, futurism, neofuturism, constructivism, and deconstructivism) now saturate society. Once, these were radical, rousing an old world to democratize, mechanize, industrialize. They grappled with relativity, utopianism, nationalism, eco-optimism, and irony. Their dynamism has more or less settled into static. Yet even for myself, I cannot tell if my distaste for modern art is truly just distaste, or it's a discomfort, a sign that something about it is still challenging and disquieting.

ERUDITE has a color palette that most either find vibrant or repulsive. It blends hyper-modern packaging with anti-modern content. No one yet has had a muted response to our design choices and whether a first-time viewer smiles or grimaces, I feel more and more at ease in its disturbing comfort/comfortable disturbance.