How Wilhelm Busch might approach Art & Design
The whirl of colors, the shapes that leap and curtsy! They call it “Art” and “Design” now, with such earnest faces. One sees much that is merely… much. A grand pronouncement, a flutter of silks, but where is the honest observation? Where is the stark truth, laid bare like a bruised apple?
These contraptions they hold, these glass panes reflecting faces twisted in silent astonishment! They stare, and then they tap. And the images change. It is a quickness I do not understand. Yet, the folly remains the same. I see a man, puffed up with his own importance, proclaiming his creation a “masterpiece.” The lines are fussy, the colors loud and boastful, like a drunkard at a feast. He desires praise, the nod of the crowd. But what does it *say*? It screams, but says nothing.
“Man muss die Dinge sehen, wie sie sind,” I have always held. And what I see is a great deal of effort spent on making the simple complicated, and the ugly seem beautiful. They build towers that scrape the sky, not to house the needy, but to admire their own daring. They paint pictures of… well, of other pictures, or of feelings too vague to grasp.
Is this “Art”? To fill the eye and leave the mind empty? To adorn the world with a thousand distractions, so that one forgets to look at the gnawing rat in the corner, or the beggar huddled in the doorway? I prefer the simple, the sharp, the honest stroke of a pen that reveals the hidden mischief in a pair of suspenders. That, at least, tells a truth. The rest is a pretty, hollow echo. A garish parade, and soon enough, the music stops.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Wilhelm Busch’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.