I'm tired of extreme for extreme's sake in art, as well as absurdity for absurdity's sake. Penises and vaginas and blood and gore everywhere (not in Hesse's work, but it's where so many have taken the same ideas). Every art show I go to in Berlin is filled with this crap, and everyone is running around cooing "it's so extreme! I love it!". It's crass. It's tired. It's boring. I want art to actually communicate something other than "LIFE IS EXTREME AND ABSURD AND MAKES NO SENSE!!!!!" About 2% of the time, yes. What about the other 98%? Why can't a piece of art be beautiful, well crafted, and try to say something complex, on it's own, without a bunch of subjective narrative attached to it?

Anyway, done venting. Hesse's art is lovely. But I'm tired of it and art like it.

The 2% is real, the 98% is absurd; that's the point.

It's really not at all absurd. Its trying to make sense of a messed up life. The dichotomy she was wresting with is central to the best art: order vs chaos, meaningful vs arbitrary... Dionysian vs. Apollonian. Just ask Nietzsche!

Just went to another huge art exhibition today in Berlin. A huge converted power plant (not Berghain) filled with art. All crap. Papier mache dead bodies with spears through them. Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie, and Jesus were the main figures. A couple of horses that look like 12 year old girls who like ponies painted them. Lack of technique everywhere. Voiceless artworks by the hundreds. The space itself was by far the most interesting thing there. It goes in the 2% of life that was absurd (and I don't know #2, sounds like you have a much stranger life than I do, and I'm an expat living in the hipster capital of the planet on a budget I would have starved to death on the streets in Seattle on, it's not all that absurt or extreme). I'm a concert pianist, I play great works of art all the time, I know one when I see (or hear) one. Hesse's aren't great, the ones at the art show today weren't great, the great ones are rarely about a messed up life, and when they are they're more about the life part and less about the messed up part. All the art I see, and have seen for years, feels directionless and mute, like no one can figure out something worth while to say. I don't blame the artists in the slightest though, it's just about impossible to create something worthwhile in these mediums these days, classical music as well, definitely. But, I hold out hope. Perhaps I'll make some art that speaks about that hope. That is something I'd perhaps actually want to see.

“Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.” Lily Tomlin