When I was a law student at New York University, I would make weekly (or more) pilgrimages to the wealth of museums available there. One of my favorites, visited often, was the Museum of Modern Art, which then housed Picasso's immortal "Guernica," his homage to the horror of the Spanish Civil War and all war in general. This powerful, magnificent leap of the imagination, horror captured through the medium of an artist's soul, captivated me. Every time I visited that museum (often), I would ritually stand for a few minutes in front of that masterpiece trying to fathom the human condition and the new ways there were suggested (as with Picasso himself) of dealing with our basic human condition.
This, alas, is a perennial human struggle. Yet, ironically in our own time of advanced technological development, one of the timeless antidotes to man's inhumanity -- the artistic imagination, its arena and all kindred arenas -- are being supplanted with an evermore hungry yearning for a realism that cries for actual blood.
This is, perhaps, a fatal folly. We must return to arenas of "discourse" that accentuate our humanity, not destroy it.
