Richard Patefield wrote:
I have offered you the chance to get out of the animist dark ages, forget the metaphysics and really communicate something. If you want to stay back there with those who would reward the continuation of the attitudes and aesthetics of 50yrs ago, I don't mind.
Ha! Now that's amusing. Everything you say is backwards. You don't advance art by setting guidelines or critical frameworks that apply in perpetuity. Art is advanced by imagination, free thinking, unbounded creativity. The artist must dream and endeavour to make those dreams a reality. Far from being stuck in the attitudes and aesthetics of fifty years ago (I don't know where that came from) anyone who has been in bonsai for a decade will tell you that I and others of like mind are continually breaking the mold and extending the boundaries of bonsai. If we were to abide by the criteria you wish to set in 2008, half a century from now we would all be stuck in the fifty year-old attitudes and aesthetics of Richard Patefield.
No, my friend, I will dine heartily on magic and metaphysics and leave you to waste away while you pick at the crumbs of outdated and long abandoned conformity.
