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For fellow travellers on a journey to the moon
Young Bites. Dated: 9/21/2018 12:12:54 PM
A cubist moon. An abstract expressionist moon. A lyrical abstraction moon. A telematic moon. A lowbrow moon. A digital moon. Museums of modern and postmodern art could be the biggest beneficiaries of Elon Musk’s moonshot. Because Japan has set the space bar high. Very high. Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa, who has been selected to be the first commercial space tourist, has chosen to take six to eight artists from all over the world along for the ride. They will be launched into lunar orbit, and will transform their experience into art after they return to terra firma. A citizen of a less evolved nation could have chosen very different travel mates. Bureaucrats wearing awful suits. Defence and security experts wearing self-satisfied smiles. Digital entrepreneurs wearing hoodies. Godmen, life coaches and leadership-wallahs wearing their charlatanry on their sleeves. The neighbourhood politician. Kim Kardashian. The world is indebted to Japan for saving us all from such horrors. Let us hope that Maezawa is as discerning in choosing individual artists as he has been in choosing their class. Please, let us not have impostors who might invite us to observe the Sea of Tranquility in a sectioned shark. Or to gaze upon a bellybutton in extreme close-up and visualise the Galilaei crater. The world of art is not without its charlatans, and some of them are in high places. But are we making too much of this? While SpaceX is taking a man within reach of the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions, humans and their remains have been routinely going to space. The Russians invited commercial astronauts aboard to defray the costs of the Mir space station after the USSR broke up, for instance. The ashes of prominent citizens like acid champion Timothy Leary and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry are in orbit. And a pinch of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh have flown past Pluto — which he had identified in 1930 — and is now in the Kuiper Belt. From that immense, system-wide perspective, a moonshot looks like a very small matter.