Art creates a mobile sanctuary protected from utilitarian extraction

Evidence

Art has a funny way of thinking otherwise—of spinning apocalypse into dialectic. It flips conventions and rewards inventiveness, and thereby creates space for ideas and methods and stories to bloom, protected from the trampling pressures of utility and flat-footed greed for return-on-investment. In a way, art invites us to a kind of always-mobile sanctuary—that special condition where, often with others, we work to understand, to achieve conscious awareness of our actual experiences in their richness and complexity. This is the sanctuary of “interpretation,” and it is at the heart of the humanities, as they eke out a living in colleges and universities across America. But the goodness of interpretive understanding is hardly owned by a bunch of academics. It belongs to all of us, as the lyric freedom of our minds and senses—let loose on what we love to see and hear and discuss with our friends. This is what our attention does when we take it off the treadmill of the frackers. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 386

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the third pillar of the manifesto’s program: sanctuary, and locates it in interpretation.
• ADDENDUM: Deepens the sanctuary concept in the ‘attention as justice’ thesis, complementing the treatment of spiritual retreats as rest from extraction.
• XREF: The ‘treadmill’ vividly invokes the human-fracking extraction metaphor that anchors the book.