‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it’s raining.’

As the saying goes, ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’

Producing around 100,000 chemical reactions and 50,000 thoughts, the human brain, the command centre of our nervous system, is a natural wonder. With this titanic processing power, we tend to believe that our judgement would be vastly precise, but that’s far from the truth.

We have long been curious about the circumstances in which it’s right to believe. The key source of this allurement is the desire to believe something for which we have inadequate evidence.    

What gives you the right to believe whatever you want to believe? What gives you the right to believe that climate change is a hoax, or you’re racially and morally superior because you’re white, or the Earth is flat? Such right to believe is a negative right. If your mind is closed, it’s not open for learning.

‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining,’ as G E Moore, an English philosopher, in the 1940s, said, concerning absurdity. Moore's paradox emphasises on our unwillingness to acknowledge of ourselves that we occasionally believe false things. Our pride grooms us into wanting to be correct at all times.

We know we’re wrong when we choose not to believe in the vital goodness of, and the truth about, humanity but, frankly, we don’t care, because it helps us to be content or happy by believing in what’s wrong.

At MoMA

According to Sturgeon's law, ninety per cent of everything is crap. I recently visited MoMA in New York, and, guess what, like what most of the people having inadequate understanding of contemporary art would believe, I thought Sturgeon, an American science fiction writer, was right in his adage. You would browse a floor after another of the museum and fail to breed much familiarity between your traditionalistic taste for art and what a modern art museum, like MoMA and London’s Tate Modern, has to offer.

The Birth of the World by Joan Miro

Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Martin Puryear, Lisa Yuskavage, Anicka Yi, Martin Assig, Dan Graham, and the list goes on. Who are they? I don’t know any of them. I never heard of them, I never read about them. A wide array of drawings, photographs, statues, paintings, and all sorts of weird objects that most of us cannot relate ourselves to... What’s the point? What’s the point of all these? What’s the point of modern art?          

What make a piece of art good are the standards we hold it to. The meaning of art is often static. Not art, but its style and concepts change their meaning through time. Contemporary art is essentially a break-off from classical ideas as it challenges the accepted concept of beauty. Trying to understand modern art from our traditionalist perspective is a mistake most of us make.

The Lovers by Rene Magritte

To understand art, one needs to recognise the raison d'etre of the piece, and then evaluate it by those standards. The same applies to contemporary art, which is bad, ugly, and meaningless only if we see it through the lens of a traditionalist. Modern art doesn’t connote representation for representation's sake, but rather stimulates us to look from different vantage points.  

Modern art is about the exploration of and setting new standards of ideas, visions, and creativity. It is the art of our time. Connecting with it often requires more of us. 

The Wheel of Ixion

Life is like a treadmill, and, even more so the ‘wheel of Ixion,’ as Schopenhauer said. A wheel that never stands still. Schopenhauer uses the wheel of Ixion as a symbolism to describe our incessant will to satisfy our desires.

Ixion, the king of the Lapiths in Greek mythology, attempted to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus, who rules as king of the gods of Mount Olympus. Ixion was punished for this crime by binding to an ever-spinning wheel of fire. Ixion's suffering was eternal.

To Schopenhauer – who was possibly the only prominent philosopher to declare himself a pessimist, happiness was just a fleeting state of not suffering. Samuel Beckett makes this disillusionment more exciting in his novel Watt, which is known for its philosophical and grim humour and deliberately unidiomatic English:

‘The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.’  

We always find ourselves on a fiery wheel of Ixion that keeps spinning.