By Paul Levy
The artist casts a liberating fragrance, spelling out what is hanging in the air. When a group of people abdicate their individual responsibility to be creative, a great artist like Vincent Van Gogh becomes inevitable as a compensation for this one-sidedness. Art is the compensatory dream of the collective culture, a means by which the collective unconscious informs collective society. Art should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon separate from the field of consciousness in which it arises; rather, artists and their work emerge from a synergy of interweaving socio-cultural factors. Artists are dreamed up by the spirit of time and place. Jung comments, “The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity which flow around him.”
