Letter to the Bank #67 (What Art Can Do For You?)

Dear Manager of my Accounts, Bank Advisor, Financial Oracle of Yore,

After some serious thought I’ve decided to downgrade you. I stared into my iced coffee for a good few minutes before making this drastic decision and can only give you an F.

1. You stood idly by and let the madmen vote in your favor thus proving you cannot think counter-intuitively.
2. You revelled in the fact that interns in Congress cheerfully did your bidding (so saving you astronomical lobbyist fees) and thus revealed your culturally boorish nature.
3. You have, as usual, failed to stand up for anything except your own bottom line...so now you must fall.

Your thick skin resists. My penetration quotient disappoints. You still don’t get it. I haven’t gained access. The disappointment is so great I’m once more inclined to stop writing these letters. In them I’ve always grappled with describing the emotions of financial distress and have failed to seek out or find effective coping mechanisms. I do make Art and whilst it is, as I've said before, worth way more than money, it still fails to bring in the bread and butter. I always was more interested in expression than practicalities. Still I persist in wanting to get through to the mutable you, that figment of my imagination who runs in the unfeeling world of acquisition that is Hedge Fund Land, the Financial Sector, the Marketplace. The wistful hope remains that I might show you to that deep, dark place where your emotions reside, shivering, scared and neglected, help you connect, warm you up to real gut feeling, and then get you out into the sunlight, guide you out of the darkness that hovers over us all. But these letters seem trite in face of the hugeness of the problems we all are facing. I cannot explain the Economy nor would I presume to do so though my understanding of the economy may be just as water tight as yours or anybody else’s—trouble is that isn’t saying much and gets us nowhere. These feeble missives hardly aid the jobless or the homeless. Some understanding of the human side of what happens in markets sinks in but in the face of astronomical greed I remain as ever gob-smacked and stunned in the focused, narrow beam of your cold headlights, a wounded little pocket pet grown conscious of why you’ll never take me to the vet. You’ll pat me on the head, stroke me, watch me on my treadmill, and then flush me down the toilet when inside-out bowel syndrome strikes—so much for me putting you on notice with a downgrade.

Thankfully the madness, the impotence, the inaction, the hopelessness is now being captured and cornered daily by courageous writers in so many parts of the media universe that the insane and unreasonable voices, loud and obnoxious as they are, must eventually be drowned out by common sense.

Meanwhile what can Art do to help? What has he to offer in these surreally difficult times? He can slither though cracks, cross borders without a passport, pen cartoons that dissect with precision and send—get this—electronically! He can look through holes in the fabric of fraying societies the world over and report back on what he sees. He must see and hear and smell and feel harder, and do so outside the box, seen only by choice, revealed on his own terms, not telling the obvious stories but those stories that blow open the conventions that hold us all down. He stencils the walls of your institutions, sings in the library, upends convention, turns your golf game inside out and so changes your perceptions, gives you alternative perspectives, and permission to re-envision this whole experiment called Life on Earth. He even gives you permission to doubt yourself, change your mind, admit failure and be silent once in a while.

Whilst Art works at his modest goals you might consider looking at what you do from a different angle yourself. Write that check whilst standing on your head. Sell those bundled mortgages whilst intoning a story from Edgar Allen Poe, but always have a mind to the hurt you might cause if you allow your hubris to undermine due diligence.

This humble life lesson offered sincerely by yours truly,

Kristian A. Witherkay