It's fun to imagine what our responses might have been had there been a slightly different history of illustrations.
One might, for instance, imagine that the entire category of "real" art is overwritten so that only ancient aboriginal art is considered valuable and everything else us a pale, garbage alternative.
This shifts the initialization values of our cognitive lenses such that our encounter with the world is pre-categorized in accordance with those values and implied frameworks.
It doesn't eliminate the possibility of seeing things in a different way, it just pushes us towards keeping them the same because change is an "opt out" requiring physical manifestation of agency.
Imagine how much art I could sell if I gave everyone a small work on a subscription and deducted the amount from their accounts automatically (~$5).
Along with the art, there's a QR code that asks you to fill out some tedious paperwork to get your money back and end your subscription.
Besides being illegal, it proves my point. We have a world we're thrown into this situation (body, philosophical underpinnings, customs , etc). The decision to reject any number of these constraints ends up being the litmus test for what we actually care about and believe in. When there is no cost to the opt-out, we cannot say that there was really anything "opted in" upon. And so the entire discourse of our lives (between being and non-being) is this perpetually ongoing negotiation with the contours of our primary disposition — which are the ever-stabilizing (and destabilizing) rules of asserting one's will within any given context.
What having read this should do, is welcome you (or re-welcome you) into a space where we recognize that things regarded as adamantine have very soft edges, or the capacity to become something we previously may have regarded as opposing, then reenter the crystallized state just as easily.
