Art and artists

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Comment by zachary samuel krueck on July 20, 2009 at 8:16pm

imagine a large or small collaboration between some integral theorist/philosophers and some of today's visionary artists. ken wilber wrote an intro to a book by alex grey, probably one of the most famous integral artists. check him out online as well as luke brown, chris dyer, paul laffoley (in a class by himself), there are many others on sites such as iasos, erowid, nemo's utopia, tribe 13, i am unifiied, and psygarden.be. i don't consider all of the art on these sites to necessarily be visionary/integral, the lines are hazy and debatable. the thing is, and this is where it gets tricky, is whether ornot the vision for the piece came to them or if the artist arrived at a vision. i believe that as far and as complex as philosophers and thinkers have gone with frameworks, mindmaps, lattices, waves, states, etc. visionary artists have gone as far and have gotten as complex with their art. whether or not the artist made the work with the help of psychedelic drugs is not the issue here (but if someone wants to explore that with me i'll put in my two cents, as i was an artist before i used drugs and after, i'm clean and sober now), the point is, many artist say they not only saw what they drew, painted, etc. but they interacted with it, they were there or they talked to an entity. this is not uncommon and i think worth looking into. check out the psychedelic research of stanislov grof for more info. the benefits would be mutual-artists would do wonderful interpretations of stages, waves, levels, mandala-like aqal squares with creative input from the philosophers. likewise the philosophers could take existing wirks of art and provide various interpretations using integral/psychological language in addition to the explanations the artist may already have. many creative mutant art/pphilosophy books would be made. who knows, maybe it all is just chemical reactions like they say, i doubt it but i had to acknowledge the naysayers.