I’m retiring from Art.

I have an extreme development that I’m excited to be unfortunately saddened by happiness to tell you about. It has come to my attention that the next phase of my artistic career is to retire early. There are too many associations that can’t be escaped and there is just too much stuff out there. Consider my retirement a population control for culture.

To clarify, my retirement will change nothing in actuality. It is purely a personal paradigm shift as well as an invitation to others in my life who wish to overlap journeys. I will ask that we all refrain from referring to Dana Telsrow as an “Artist” and anything that he creates as “Art”.  When one asks what type of music I make, I will linger in the wordless mish mash of genre and fail to give it a name. It is no longer music to me dear friends.

There are some definite events leading me to this decision. I have, overtime, begun to take in less and less art. Art has become extremely convoluted as tools for marketing and self-promotion have become available to almost anyone with an internet connection and device. Everyone is asking me to take a look or take a listen and I do sort of feel bad for not always taking the time, but I need some space.

The space I need is located in an intangible realm of extremely focused distraction. A totally engaged disengagement. A vertex of plus and minus. The intersection of all paradox. Art, in the prior sense, was something deeply personal that I didn’t particularly feel like sharing. Meaning, I didn’t want to share my relationship with it with anyone else. Displaying the outcome of my relationship to art is a completely different story.

Linguistic devices are too prominent with the current state of art. There is too much description, definition, deconstruction, opinion, criticism, evaluation, and communication about communication. As a result, art becomes an item of elevation. It exists on a plane higher than that of pure and plain existence.  Works become inherently “meaningful” as a reflection of and correlation to human experience.

On one hand we have the notion of creation in a biblical sense, where the creation was clearly full of intent and purpose. And there is the scientific explanation of the arrival of anything which throws out a foundation of intent in preference for a reverse lineage of what seems to be provable fact. My relationship with art lives somewhere between those two histories.

I must pause here and give a brief notice to you about how I am writing. This writing style is a form which I think is probably cyclical. It only ends because I have to be at my second job in 15 minutes. Theoretically, it could keep going forward. My original thought and entry point into the cycle of thought-writing was that I am retiring from art. which I am. However, that thesis does not necessarily need to stand fast as the main point of the written piece. A type of learning occurs when we allow ourselves to float along an idea like we are on an endless lazy river. The sights change and the current shifts and we bump into someone else who then sends us in a slightly different direction. It is a thought-based meditation which, left unattended, takes us deep into the vast emptiness of a language-less universe. This universe is one of, if not the main reason for why I am retiring from art.

More to come on this subject, check back for updates and more revelation about the nature of this change. Heading to work now.