‘Hide the ideas, but so that people find them.

                       The most important will be the most hidden.’

                                                                       - Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

So as to meet larger audiences — and stave off death sentences of an either symbolic or temporal flavor — Art has long had a history of hiding its most essential meanings under seemingly non-prejudicial veneers. Religiously non-denominational Renaissance painters, requiring commission remuneration from the biggest benefactors of the day — the Catholic Church and its constituents — would often hide anti-clerical meanings, heretical philosophies, and blasphemously sensuous undertones beneath their Passion pictorials; if able to stray into the portrayal of Hellenistic myth, would frequently encode these tableaus of seemingly imperial-praising Greco-Romanism with the hidden mysteries of empire-divergent Hermeticism or with attributes of scientific mystery maligned by the Western power structure of the day; sometimes, within the macro-stories of theocratic dominion, even intersperse some juicy personal self-myth (— though whether or not Sandro Botticelli replicated Simonetta Vespucci’s image in paintings out of true love or mere coincidence is still up for grabs…)

Various images suggesting Simonetta Vespucci by Botticelli

Around the same time, the visual language of the Tarot infiltrated the aristocratic oats-sowings of European youths on their inter-continental Grand Tours. The seeming parlor game, supposedly popularized by Saracen itinerants — what was the basis for later playing card ‘games of chance’ that array Las Vegas in infinitum to this day — was an encoded persistence of Egyptian visual language legend claims, one purportedly saddled up with Alexandrian Hellenism, Levantine Kabbalism, Hermetic Gnosticism, and Arthurian visual language; all of it alleging a lineage via syncretic myth — a Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, if you will — of esoteric philosophy. And one hinting together, Hermeticists would suggest, towards discovery of the 'Philosopher's Stone'...

Regardless of its function, the visual symbology of the Tarot was all cobbled together, somewhere in the 1500s, to create a dense portable pictography with enough Christian visual touchstones sprinkled on top to avoid the ire of the Holy Roman auto de fes of the day — its deepeer meanings, in other words, masked by its incorporated imagery ripped — in cards like 'Il Papa', 'The Emperor', and 'The Tower' — from the legends and characters central to the empire of Holy Rome. (Coincidentally, the glommed-together ‘movement’ under which the tarot is ascribed these days is named ‘occult’; meaning: ‘hidden’…)

Various Queen Cards, The Sola Busca Tarot, 1491

Even in the 20^th Century, the so-called Hays Code — the self-censorship apparatus of the largest mass medium enterprise the world had ever known, called ‘Hollywood’ — prompted, in the state of Spanish- then Anglo-settled California, the inventiveness of filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, say, to foment whole counter-narratives of hidden meaning beneath seemingly pat suspense films, these also ruled by a studio-based Ministry of Censorship; one none-too-coincidentally in-step with another Catholic power-structure of the day, The Legion of Decency...  And in its lower moments, this practice, by major directors and writers, of burrying hidden meanings, may have consisted, with Hitchcock specifically, in semi-tawdry, non-too-subtle — and rather corny, to be fair — dick jokes made, one has the feeling, as middle finger to both to the Hays Code/MPAA and the unavoidably ‘mid’ American viewer of 1950something (see: the punctuating ‘train in the tunnel’ shot concluding North By Northwest for one such example…)

Nevertheless, in moments of greater inspiration, this practice of creative 'hide n seek' also carried whole groundswells of potent ideation for the meaning-hungry (perhaps, -thirsty), placed very deliberately like ‘a well below the cathedral’, to quote Colin Wilson’s own occult beliefs regarding ley lines, holy sites, and underground streams (see: The Occult: A History, 1971)…

Something hidden so as not only to protect itself politically, in other words, but artistically…

Take Vertigo, for instance — a movie whose surface murder-plot hokum relies on the believability of a pretty unlikely dead-ringer in femme fatale Kim Novak, appearing identical, in public, to the antagonist's soon-to-be-murdered wife. Despite the far-fetched-ness of the set-up, on repeat viewings, the film becomes, thematically speaking, a rather heartbreaking indictment despite this. Of Tinseltown’s absolute control over its desperate female actors; about their use — by directors and producers — for baiting broken post-war male members of the movie-going public; and about this devious apparatus of ‘show biz’ procurer-behavior, used to disguise the greater sins of the industry — and country’s — true emperors… Who always — always — appear to be getting away with murder… (“You could do it in those days,” argues shipping czar-turned-wife-killer Gavin Elster, wistfully about Olde San Francisco and a discarded woman that, re-occuringly, haunts the film, “Men had the freedom… and the power…”) 

'Vertigo'

Hitchcock, of course, could not come out and trash the very industry he was working for outright from a political perspective; but, more imporantly, from an artistic one, if he had made a 1958 version of 'Swimming With Sharks' there's no way it would have had the gravitas that currently gurgles, potent as any poesy, through the artwork's gorgeous marrow now. To re-enforce his masterwork's hidden meaning (one of many), Hitchcock returns to this line about 'power and freedom' numerous times, uttered by different characters and with varying degrees of dismay...

So as regards this 'hiding' of deeper meaning in quiet repetitions, Robert Bresson wasn’t the first, but he may be the most economical in describing the mechanics of this instinct in the artistic temperament: to bury what’s most important in a work of Art so that the audience can feel it more deeply (see headlining quotation). Hardly a game of superiority-baiting — or worse, obtuseness for the sake of it (…or even worse, that completely meaningless blockbuster wink: ‘the Easter egg’) — the ‘hide n seek’ of meaning within Great Art more closely takes into account human frailty in its stratagem. Ideas are bright like a spotlight; staring at them directly somehow instantaneously induces Kleig eyes. Indeed, Ideas, the cargo of Art — as Emerson asserted about the persuasiveness of arguments — appear to burn more brightly by catching them in your peripheral vision. Do so by your finding them a bit on accident, having sought and found them yourself, rather than being wrestled to the ground, shouted at, and clobbered over the head with them…

This of course does not mean that Art must SAY something, so much that its parts, when assembled, must to the human mind MEAN something.

And sometimes that Meaning, even, can be about meaninglessness...

'Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Epoch of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture in Germany' by Hannah Höch

Dadaism served such a function, to defy the1920s convention in the bourgeois for pat meaning in culture, a seeming resurgance of which we are seeing again today: every lululemon advert, seems like,  a cry for diluted corporate feminism; every Hollywood film, till resently, feels like, testament of flimsy imperialist-faked philosophies on racial justice. With the current president's second term, there are even flimsier political anticedents unleashing now on the Right as well (see: Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle spot...) but perhaps the only resonant part of the ‘anti-woke’ gag reflex that guides these creative and commercial counterarguments is not that ideas of subjugation and victimhood don’t need rumination (which somehow, still enraptured with watered-down 2000s shock-jocks like Kid Rock, is somehow the alt-right demand...); no, an underlying truth is that these issues need to be broached with richness and thoughtfulness and substance instead. Ideas in other words. Whereas, in trying to insert potent cultural interrogation into mass commodities, these subjects are diluted and debased through corporate appropriation. Particularly when executives, driven by a misguided sense of zeitgeist and influence, decide to infuse superficial products with social messages (— for instance, Mattel toy brands, superhero IP, f*cking Mario Bros...) does this justifiable requirement for cultural Ipacec take hold, giving needless credance to otherwise outmoded far-Right griping... (As should come as no surprise, Der Führer loved Disney...)

This merging of corporate and middling political humanitarian ideology one might call Liberal Imperial Art; the intersection of Commerce, Imperial Demands (...say, not talking about certain things that might get your museum show cancelled...), but with enough pretend interest in Liberal Humanism to whitewash the very colonial behavior that, pressured by collectors, board members, and secret-imperial journalists, artists are somehow not allowed to touch... 

And so, as it is in Art these days Ideologically, so it is Formally; in figuration especially (…remember everyone making all that one-note 'Trump bad' art like five years ago?): literalism and asubstantive Imperial-Humanist political kneejerk is a disease now co-opted completely by corporate art purveyors and blue chip rosters alike. Social media culture — slave to the fear-mongering undertaste of a perpetual PR state — demands clarity over obscurity in order to bank 'Likes'. Indeed, public opinion — itself, measured these days by unsubstantive, but severe, political metrics wholly unaffiliated with what a series of artworks may even mean — somehow has conjoined, on the one hand, a painfully middle-brow liberal fear of offense with, on the other, a far-Right allergy to creative obfuscation. The two conjoining to create, since DT Term 1 and definitely since COVID, some of the worst Mass Art pretending its Good Mass Art every made.

Accounting for two-second impressions online, this pedantic artistic practice of literalism, political cowardice, and the hope for a bland, unoffending Mass Appeal, with Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Fascism together, enhances literalism in our art culture to brave new lows and bleeds into practices at every level. (Better artists, as below, at least incorporate the irony of propograndistic language when deploying 'message' Art — implicating themselves in the obtuseness, as with David Howe's hilarious series on Mark Zuckerberg...)

'Young People, Follow the Beloved Leader!' by David Howe

Broaching Political Ideas in this way, then, as a merely kneejerk checked box — one insincerely clicked so as to garner luke warm laurels that fit corporate guidelines — mean concepts are probed not for their burning questions or bright insights, each of which stem from the personal eccentricities of an individual Artist Mind, but instead grapple for some faux universality so as to place on an Approval Matrix prepared to use then forget your 'issue art' just as quickly (...guys, remember how 'Wonder Woman' was the next peak feminism? 'Green Book', a peon to racial justice?). With this kind of corporate-concession creative behavior, a pat universality is infused within a creative product not for the connectiveness of All Humankind, of course, but to appease some belittling conception of an underserved monolith that ends up just being, anyway, A Bunch Of Guys In Suits Giving These Ideas Permission To Exist. A practice these days splitting our contemporary richness of diversity in observation (Art’s implicit silver lining) into Institutional Guidelines demographics boxes that monetize diversity of exteriority and call it a day; easier for selling from Target (for major corporations), and for keeping us politically fractured (for our united duopolistic political cabal). (Or, in the case of Art, this capitulation to hollow trend easier for selling to corporate collectors who want their hands held by some public opinion that, like the artwork itself, gives them the comfort of having felt manufactured...)

Wisdom against this practice of creating out of cultural pandering and the advertising of the exterior self, of course, can be found in words of most Great Artists, from Kara Walker to Oscar Wilde, (and contradicted by most exploitative systems and cultural hucksters, to be fair). Added to this, it is echoed by one of the greatest, for our purposes, Surrealists: Remedios Varo. Who did not wish to speak about herself  ‘because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person’.

'A Subtlety: The Marvelous Sugar Baby' by Kara Walker

To avoid bad blood in the gallery circuits, let's return to examples of the regrettable creative practice of Literalism in Mass Art instead of some of the biggest painters and sculptors currently carrying the torch. For more Feature Film samples of this behavior, for example — of Surface Ideas taking center stage over Hidden Meaning — consider the middle-brow ‘social issue’ craze that re-surfaced (at first, potently) around the Black Lives Matter protests, initiated by Oscar-winner 'Get Out', but something that now sluggishly meanders in its downward swing with trite bubble-gum facsimiles like 'Sinners'.

Of course, the impulse towards an outwardly provocative genre-sensibility is not film-historially un-earned: True Artists ever-present and brilliant in both low-brow strivers (‘Night of the Living Dead’ about Jim Crow… ‘Targets’ about the inevitability of Foucault’s imperial boomerang during Vietnam…) and sanctioned Hollywood outliers (‘Johnny Guitar’ made about anti-McCarthyism… ‘Get Out’ about the hollow promise of racial equity made by white liberalism after Obama…) together initiated mind-altering stabs at outward political provocation against all censorship odds in the '50's, '60's, and, with 'Get Out' and Peele more recently. 

But today, this tradition — now effectively co-opted into the middle-brow vanguard (again, Neo-Liberal and Far-Right Imperialist Culture) — is eagerly deployed by big budget fakers, the hollow feminism of Academy-imprimaturs like Emerald Fennel and Coralie Fargeat at least upstaged by towering arthouse masters of the more-oblique (greatest of all, Cannes 2025 standout Mascha Schilinski, her incredible ‘Sound of Falling’ a thematically dizzying feminist soft-horror epic that tackles the 'spooky old house' sub-genre with understated mastery).

'The Sound of Falling'

Given this failure in the ubiquitizing of the Social Issues film, it's perhaps less surprising that the shorthand of rich, ironic, and winkingly stylized racial and class critique made mainstream by Pop-Gothic mass-thematist Jordan Peele has died on the vine in Ryan Coogler’s most recent overly-Oscar-nominated stab at this endeavor, seemingly bewitching half the nation with something corny as a Fresh Prince swagger and about as insightful as a Brentwood community board, the one upside at least having the advantage of also putting to glorious 70mm one of the most cringe-inducing ‘statement scenes’ in the History of Cinema…

(Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, no right-wing populist film in existence has ever been even a contender for the realm of consideration as Art, just so we’re clear… And Coogler's win can at least be thanked, industry-wise, in earning the celebration of original content in a sea of sequels and franchise carbon copies whose shopworn IP has officially been flogged — filmically speaking — within an inch of their lives...)

All this to say, with Mass Art (film) as with Fine Art — when Meaning, in other words, gets occupied by the demands of Empire, even to ostensibly own the dialogue against Empire, it must retreat into symbol, abstraction, dream, and code.

'Weapons'

Say, when a creation like 'Sinners' drastically overplays the mass-appeal shorthand popularized by 'Get Out', in other words, the Cultural Thermometer in the overarching Artist Brain recalibrates the mercury, tries to find a more Truthful center. And we get an inspired alternative like 'Weapons': a film whose tackling of current events seem to conjoin school shootings and years of witnessing atrocities towards children in U.S. imperial warzones abroad but does so without stating outright any hard and fast ‘message’ about either. That constructs, instead, a peon enmeshed in a more magical and surrealist tradition, in other words, concerned that an overt approach has been co-opted…

By the end of the film you find yourself weeping as children tear the architect of their suffering limb from limb partly because, the week before, you were being fed images of mutilated Gazans in pink PJs and Venezualan 5 year-olds being arrested and bussed out beyond United States boundaries.

Zach Cregger's take on the Social Issue Horror Film, thus, returns us to dream-like obliqueness from frank provocation — but an obliqueness with recognizeable touchstones; the film taping nerve endings of meaning that avoid the heavy-handed-ness that — in a society first shocked with the reality of mass upheaval around COVID — has since prioritized polemics so drastically as to completely obliterate the highly delicate vessel carrying it and blur the polemics themselves. (Like all things, in another 10 or 20 years, a genius take on the Overt Social Issues Horror Genre will probably — in a brand new incarnation — return...)

For right now, though, it appears this new Poetic Obliqueness in the face of message oversaturation is probably where Art and Film, both, are headed; particularly in an age where the Opposition has now blatantly joined with the Oppressor; where money can no longer come to the rescue of Art or Truth (if ever it did); where nearly everyone with influence, turns out, has been to the f*cking Epstein Island... Democrats are Republicans, Labor are Tories. White is black, up is down  (— and sadly, giving us no alternative even to root for the Bad Guys, down is also still down, the era of the Anti-Hero also long dead...)

'To Sleep With Anger': surrealist touches in occult-tinged Gullah L.A.

Time to retreat. Regroup. Resuccitate. 

Abstract. Obscure. 

To Dream...

And so, in the realm of artistic genres — despite the fact that all eras of Art have had, through necessity or instinct, this impulse to encode their works with meaning meant to be sought rather than sold — it is perhaps a Neo-Surrealism that now most ignites the requirement for intuition in finding meanings within a medium’s hidden folds again, particularly as museums cancel the shows of politcally dissenting artists and the Billionaire-Class Mass Media again attempts to replace True Art with Imperial derivations...

We are in the terrain, once more, of a Theocratic Judeo-Christian Imperialism — one that, familiarly, uses the brand of religiosity for its own politial protection, but sadly, not the practice of the spiritual philosophy they pretend in their religious affiliations for ours.

Familiarly, this New 'Holy Rome' has reclaimed a seat on the throne it never lost, just fractured; changed its name to NATO, the United States, other names... Like Holy Spain with its destruction of the Muslim Golden Age, or the Euro-immigrating settlers staking their claims on native lands later to be termed "America" meaning 'Home Ruler',  the West continues on with an expansionist plan in the colonially named 'Middle East', executing mass-occupations and destabilizations through Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again that eerily echo General Wesley Clark's 2007 prediction. Effectively proving —  geo-politically speaking —  almost zero distinction between them all... (Pepsi is Coke... Pizza Hut is Taco Bell... Or perhaps Democrats and Republicans, better said, are a Combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell...)

How do we again find the potency of Art's symbologies, poetries, and magick, then, in an age where we don't even feel like a vote, between two political parties, does anything Material Good?

Particularly when Activism is not functionally effective within Art, where is Art's true potency? How do we wrest it back from the Board members and tech dork Blackshirts and NYT Opinion Piece Ivy League trust fund kids?

In the avant-guard film space, student of both Kenneth Anger and Luis Bunuel, Elder Statesman Surrealist of Americana David Lynch had a lifetime career speaking to the idea that talking about his films is pointless; ‘the film is the talking’ he would very frequently be heard to say.

'La Jetée'

And many filmmakers in the American avant-guard Anger embodied — influenced by the penultimate voice of Maya Deren — deployed, also, a kind of proto-surrealism, abstracting meaning more and more towards intuition as they concocted mythopoetries, materialist cinema, and simulacra far outpacing Hitchcock in their appeal to hidden truths (though Chris Marker, one of the most narratively reverential, would indeed, through his masterpiece La Jetee, harken back to Vertigo as a narrative touchstone even within his avant-guard, still-photograph spree…)

In this era where artists’ entire museum shows can be dismantled for weighing in on genocide, museum exhibitions during a wholesale fascist ramp-up teed up by one party and administered by the other are indeed playing it safe — doubling down on artist exhibitions that couldn't speak less to the current moment. Nevertheless, we see the trend in refining political stylizations, coded art, Neo-Surrealism, and Hysterical Realism in the up-and-coming art-makers all around us...

Kamala Harris fist bumping Lindsey Graham, 2020

This eschewing of the post-COVID literalism is not so hot for politics, but it may be necessary for Art; to maintain the power of sentiments within Art.

As Bresson rightly suggested, in sharing meaning within Ideas ‘…the hidden will be the most true…’

Process-based painting contains a kind of hidden magic called ‘underpainting’ — where a transubstantiation of color is achieved by layering a concealed tint of pigment below the one that can be more readily discerned on top… the collaboration between the hidden and visible hues creating a almost mythological third…  

Similarly, like the hidden embroidery of Daniel Day-Lewis creation 'Reynolds Woodcock', thematic guideposts within novels and films, in the form of repeated words as with Hithcocks', thread a through-line of precisely what visual repetitions stockpiling in drawings and paintings today?

The ‘motif’, in other words, as a guidepost for a hidden (read: deeper) intention in the work, is the central target here — Basquiat’s crown, Magrittes’ bowler hat, Remedios Varo’s obsession with robes — expressing the thinness of the veil her dreamlike works pursued… It is more than fixation alone. Where compulsion only drives the obsessions of artists, Meaning — and its necessary concealment, ‘so that people find them’ — drives the motif.

'Embroidering The Earth's Mantle', Remedios Varo

Play is also of consideration here. A sub-theme (one of many) in 'Sound of Falling' — the act of play-acting in the film never belying the succession of violent tragedies befalling multigenerational reincarnations of women — it appears to be the one thing culturally, paired with rigorous organization practically, that can counteract the vile corporate fascism deployed in our streets and minds, then as now.

Playfulness alongside vile political and social truths also abuts in the paintings of Peter Saul, the films of Agnes Varda, the writings of Zadie Smith (that one unforgivable New Yorker article aside…)— Sadie Benning's amateurist masterpiece 'It Wasn't Love' replays an illicit encounter with dolls and toys and shot entirely on a children's Pixelvision camera —; Todd Haynes' copyright-banned own version of Barbie, retelling the Karen Carpenter story, also used the definitely-not-feminist doll-icon of our youths to probe themes of fame and corporate-induced female body dismorphia all within a perversion, instead of praise, of Play...

Various stills from 'It Wasn't Love' by Sadie Benning

So too now, though we engage Play for this theme, we do so understanding the bitter undertones of who is currently sought, by Imperialist fervor, by our government; who is hidden, in our political narratives — the hypocrisies never more glaring. We are on the brink of a roaring totalitarianism that has been simply a buzzing bigotry — a de facto oppression, masked in the veneer of U.N. Rules Based Order and neoliberal humanitarianism; no other choice, cueing up, like a Netflix Next-Up, the all-out free fall History told us, from our looking back at Giolitti with the Brown shirts and the Nazi's with the enabling liberal-leaning Weimar DStP — Imperial-Liberalism historically the step-and-fetch-it that opens the gates for the Far-Right — something History told us would happen all over again yet somehow, someway, this all being something so-called 'Radical Centrists' (now 'Abundance Democrats') keep on telling us still we can 'Vote Blue No Matter Who' out of existence; just one more failed candidate moving closer to the Right… Just one more faux-Progressive candidate who puts not one Progressive bit of legislation forward, condifies not one single Progressive law they run on to get the vote...

All is not lost (yet). [See definition of 'Apocalypse': to reveal, unveil, or uncover a hidden thing.] People are in the streets. Inspiration is everywhere alongside all this overt chaos. And if Social Action returns, overtly, to politics, perhaps symbol and implication can cure Art of the Philistinism that came when art was trying to 'fix the world' — via Corporate suggestion — where Action and Organizing should have been leading the charge...

For 2026, SPRING/BREAK Art Show's 'Hide N Seek’ theme desires artworks predicated on code, seeming malfeasance in the face of American imperialism, reference to the symbologic language of the artists popular during the rise of the Holy See… To process-based works, Art of materialist mysticism, master-classes on process as well...

The naked underpainting of painter Colleen Barry

For artworks in the realm of Surrealism, hidden neologism, palimpsest, underpainting…

For artworks that may not ACT as political organization and cultural upheaval but that MEAN something potent about it. And also for works in the intimate, impressionistic, personal, small — our SEEK a thing of action; or HIDE a thing of gestation and recuperation and dream.

From 'Somnambules (Sleepwalkers)' by Julie Curtiss

For inner worlds and outer limits to be effectively expressed in this constantly revising age, SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2026 looks to you to again determine what MEANING is essential in our collective understanding of the world right now; how what it buries, grows; how what it shows, whithers in the light of direct eyesight...

Come out, come out, wherever you are.  

Ready or not, here we come.