I’ll mention some authors that Sasquatch like to quote, and why. First, there’s John Dewy, you know, the Dewy Decimal System guy. Sasquatch like him because he pointed out that animals have the same kind of art experience as humans. Then there’s Marshal Mcluhan, also with a biological take, who considered art to be the way people educate their lizard brains on how to live with new technology. (We’ll go over all this later.) There’s Norman O. Brown who talks about how art channels the inextinguishable desires of repressed childhood to fulfillment, preventing personal meltdown, and Ernest Becker who shows how artists continually blaze new paths of escape from the despair endemic to human existence. Finally there’s Mark Wrathall, who, following the European existentialists, tells how art can open up a new world for a collapsing society. And even though we don’t usually take what Sasquatch think too seriously, maybe these are not such obscure considerations after all, here, at the end of an age.
