What is art?

There is an affliction that has taken our generation by the throat. No, it isn’t Attention Deficit Disorder or obesity. It is the complete and utter numbness to everything going on around us. We are vacuous sleepwalkers, roaming the earth, looking for permanent sustenance and finding only a quick satisfaction that eventually leaves us dry. Why else would we be so addicted to Red Bull?\nThis is understandable, considering that most of us developed cognitive reasoning during the socially unstable early- to mid-’90s. Art was nihilism: Exhibits seeking to reveal truth were deemed disruptive and were closed left and right, the literary world primarily consisted of readymades by Danielle Steel and John Grisham and music’s up-and-coming legend Kurt Cobain killed himself in a display of refusal to adjust to an alarmingly high-speed society.\nI remember watching the riot footage in Seattle a few days after his death and asking my mom who he was. “Nobody big,” my mom answered. My powers of intuition, however, begged to differ as I witnessed cops physically restraining the grieving grunge collective. Our generation then grew into adolescence as the Internet popped up and made the knowledge of our elders and grounded reality antiquated knickknacks.\nWe have grown up with the idea that everything that happened 10 years ago is now quaint and archaic and that our intelligence will solve everything on its own. Our bodies rarely move, and when they do, it is usually to fulfill some ultimately meaningless routine. We have ceased to do.\nOur “hippie” types go from festival to festival, fully partaking in the world of buying things in between. Our heroes are high schoolers in various upper-class beach cities popularized by one of the most evil branches of the machine, MTV. The strongest weapon we can think to use against this is anonymous, excessive blogging. What part of this is OK?\nOur background and surroundings are no excuse. We are all responsible for refusing to be a product of our environment, and as long as we are watching “The Hills” and taking shots to liven up the weeknights we remain fully irresponsible.\nProtest. Be publicly angry. Shake yourself and others so viciously that you forget what it is to be comfortable. To be where we need to be as a generation, we must break out of the ordinary and become artists of complete detailed observation. Look around yourself right now. What do you see?