> It was a tradition of a coal miner's daughter.
Lately I've been reading A People's History of the World from Verso and another book called the Contingent Object of Contemporary Art.
The history book tells me that what we have come to call civilization started more or less 5,000 years ago and that this flourishing followed upon 2,000 years of incremental growth in knowledge, mostly related to agriculture. The book also says the beginning of "civilization" was followed by decline resulting from social stratification that disrupted the accretion of knowledge gained through ordinary activity by ordinary people that pertained before.
The art book gives me fleeting moments of good feeling because contemporary art begins with privileging the "ordinary." But the timing was lousy, since said privileging coincided with the ascendancy of neoliberalism. People who began by helping us cherish the ordinary --think Warhol who grew up in working-class Pittsburgh and lived his whole life with his mother -- became part of an art star machinery instead.
I haven't sorted all this out, but I think the loss of appreciation for the ordinary is fucking us up big time.