Ambience, Prague August 2022 Visiting churches. Used to be a hightlight while visiting European cities. They are very often the architectural masterpieces of a town, hold artistic treasures, have been focal points for local stories and people. I am not religious, even reserve a healthy dose of scepticism towards religion. Still, churches have been my first exposition to art. A couple of years ago, I wanted to draw a science fiction scene, a futuristic townscape. I am not an educated drawer so my immagination wasn’t filtered by advanced visual considerations. Sure enough, the futuristic landscape was dotted with little church towers and gothic archs, just like any old little town you come across while driving through central europe.  Recently I don’t visit churches anymore. The cathedral of Prague, Peter Parler, all the details inside, didn’t bother. The cathedral of Berlin? Nope. Saint Stephen in Vienna? Haven’t been inside, since they put a fence in it, seperating free and paid-for areas in what is supposed to be a place of communion. Which brings me to ambience or aura. Passing through Brugge with my girlfriend’s family, we went to the basilica of the holy blood. When entering and leaving the building, you were greeted by the recording of coins rolling in a purse, played loudly by a machine asking for donations. I don’t even care what beauty the building holds, it could just as well have been a Lidl supermarket, my memory is jarred. I remember sitting in St. Stephen writing one of my most inspired short stories, when I really should have been at university bored in the ranks of the auditorium maximum. Now it is a tourist trap and I associate a carnivorous plant with it. I also remember Hallstatt, with my girlfriend, 10 years ago, we were young and for my part assuredly agnostic. Yet in the small chapel surmounting the city a service was held. Singing, rhythmic prayers, old people. What an ambience! You immediately understand the appeal of coming together in an orderly manner to hold a stylyzed conversation about your fears and sorrows. No more explanation needed. Point being, places are built with uses and rituals in mind, you lose one, the other loses much of it’s strength. Art and every human interaction is like this. It is known, has been written about and never been so pressingly contemporary a problem as today. Today, everything resembles an industrial process. You scroll through instagram, immediately find more art than had been created in centuries in a single day and don’t think anything about it. Some art is literally a consumer product, like video games and most of film, incredibly challenging, detailed, full of messages but in a video game, you buy an entertainment product and you really have to forcibly convince yourself to think anything more of it. For many years I didn’t like listening to Dvoraks New World or 1812, because those are popular show pieces. You hear it and you feel yourself labeled: superficial listener, because everybody knows these pieces, there is nothing special. For a while I had to convince myself that my listening of these works was in fact different to the masses, because I knew specific recordings, old ones, suggested by family members, that gave back some of the sese of discover and superiority to these works. Ambience, aura, it is everything. There is a distinct air of bullshit in all of modern art, which for a while was it’s principal attraction, when artists showed, that you can get a message across with everything from a pissoir to used tampons. We get it. Now the joke is becoming old but the world has not thought of an alternative yet. Overall this is a good development, because if art is not put up on a pedestal automatically anymore, so is nothing else. People are more critical, free to chose on the merits of personal taste and objective quality… But objective quality might not exist and people really are not more critical. We see it everyday, we are all susceptible to the news for example, today we even know that they are at least colored by short sighted political agendas, only there is nothing else, no truth we turn to in times of need.  As much of creative work is today not only produced, but also managed by individuals up to very high levels of popularity, it becomes common knowledge that the actual artwork seems almost of secondary importance for it’s success, with marketing taking first seat. There is a case to be made for an artist, who makes but one thing, and spends the rest of their life selling it in new and innovative ways. You know as well as I do, that there are such artists and especially the big names seem to fall into this category often. Art is a commodity now too and with this any feeling of importance or awe is out of the window. There are decisions to be made here, decisions that might be the defining characteristics of an artist and their art today, just like purely aesthetic decisions might have been 100 years ago. Where to put your art, how much to ask for it, to sell it or not, in which medium, in which communities. It might be more desirable to have legendary status with 100 followers, than be the next fabbricated star with 10 million listens. There is a tradeoff between impact and economic success and the whole story of fame and once-in-a-generation genius has to be reevaluated on the grounds that todays artists have the choise of what they want to be, once they reach a certain level of traction. Just as well as you can decide to be an artist next to some other activity or to do any activity as you see fit, or as others would like you to. When we talk about the big esteemed names in art history, we have to focus on the fact that they have been promoted, in some cases over hundreds of years by other human beings and that is what makes their names appear so awesome. Sometimes you feel the quality of their work deserves this level of attention, but sometimes you actually don’t. An important persona, a household name, is the joint effort of hundreds, thousands of people, and they all contribute to the artists aura, the atmosphere they evoke. From the artist's side, I feel you have to let go of notions of individual genius and importance. Those things are useful, as far as they motivate you to create. Beyond that working professionally is presenting yourself in the ambience and with the aura you desire and working with people who make this possible at the level of fame you wish to have. I call Prague the city of 1000 statues, because nowhere else I feel surrounded by so much high quality art from the middle ages to our contemporaries. One feels that artistic expression has been important here for a very long time, and still is today. Yet the city is used and markets itself as one giant bar where every hour is happy hour. On Charles bridge you sometimes can't even move for all the people on it, the masses of tourists move viscously through the worlds most impressive intestine. Yet when you get to where Kepler or Tycho Brahe lived, to a museum with world class glass artists or the now retro futuristic architecture from communist times, not a soul to be seen. This creates an ambience, which clearly indicates that you are not in Florence or Rome, the eternal city, but in the best decorated pub in the world. And this feeling has nothing to do with any objective quality of the local art.