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 probably a
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.