We live in a wish-fulfillment society and are all drowning in beauty, yet generally we are all possibly more demoralized than ever. Beauty, and pleasure, at least as we now understand them, are clearly not ultimately satisfying. Art, therefore, should be edifying. If it isn’t, then it only attends to the current sensibilities of the audience and is proportionally only craft. The criteria for success with craft is well understood, but there seems little point in making Art which the viewer already fully accepts. The more artistic a work, the more inscrutable, and the more an education it can be. Beauty is being studied scientifically, and will also soon be well understood, and beautiful things are at all times being created almost totally programmatically through technique alone, which is to say, as a craft. We’re extremely susceptible to beautiful forms of any kind, but it begins to feel vacuous and predictable, as just another pretty face or pretty painting. Then some artists try to ugly things up to relieve the boredom; and surrealism depends on the viewer having a rather normal, sane view of reality to scandalize— but it’s rather unambitious, seeking merely to scandalize normal, sane people. For now I’ve settled on making art that is beautiful, crafty, or good enough for our purposes, preferring to establish instead a technique of thinking and of living life, portraits of ideas of how to Be.