Big, Blue $43.8 million Newman “Zip” Painting On the 8 th of October, a lift technician at a museum in the Netherlands mistakenly threw away a piece of artwork made to look like two empty beer cans. Last year, the infamous artwork consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall was eaten by a hungry visitor to a gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Last month, I went to an art gallery and convulsed my face in disdain at the random blobs of paint that covered the canvases on the high walls. Modern art can be quite the sore spot for us connoisseurs. The painful abstract paintings, novels of base vocabulary, CGI drowned movies and music made on one beats app with auto-tune or nonsense lyrics physically hurt. I know I sound like your grandmother here, but bear with me when I ask you; how do you feel when you see a plain canvas covered entirely in blue paint? What emotions does a blue rectangle evoke? To me, none. But what if I told you that rectangle sold for almost $44 million? You’d probab...
Buddhism has a very interesting concept of hell. One of the hells is 'Samsara’ described as the 'suffering-laden, continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth without beginning or end’. It is perpetuated by 'karma' that every sinner creates by craving and ignorance. The soul is doomed to rebirth repeatedly until the karma is accounted for - until the soul is pure. Life of Samsara is deeply painful, unhappy and mundane. Man puts himself into anguish and creates a personal hell due to the repetitions he constructs. Reliving painful past is the torture.
Under this light, the phrase 'history repeats itself’ begins to seem unpleasant. Throughout human history, the main events have been war. Revolutions that sprung up, new religions, new ideologies, new philosophies, new questions – all begin wars. This war can be physical between, societies or countries; or mental. Undoubtedly, mental war will lead to physical action. War with the self will impel the expression of it.
The cause of war is not only rage but pride too. These are the worst characteristics of a human being but are so fundamental to the definition of one. Today we find ourselves in a world where the repetition is uncanny. After rapid industrial progress, the entire world is facing an energy crisis. Poverty and inflation haunt everyone. We are running out of water, food, shelter – the environment is dying, over three dozen countries are at war. Such serious matters must be our priority! But shouldn't they always have been? Have these crises, wars and the threats of extinction not always been here?
But Scholz wants to be Hitler, Biden wants to be Roosevelt, Putin wants to be Stalin and Johnson sees himself under Churchill's light. We too saw someone that wanted to be Bhutto. All leaders are rephrasing the words in effort to recreate the impression and power of their idols from the past. Every part of this planet is repeating some part of history. In a form worse or not, it is no longer vague.
Does history repeat itself or is it us that repeat our sins and trap ourselves in a loop of misery? Mankind does not wish to or is simply unable to break the chain of rebirth and repetition. It may just be our nature; it may be our fate. Human conscience, nature and decisions are probably as predictable for a historian as they would be for a psychologist. It has all happened before. The question remains; in fact, many questions remain. For now, is our redemption possible? If your answer is 'historic’, please reconsider it.
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