Art

Oneiric Art

making the unreal, real

by & © Mark Fairchild, 2026, Lincoln, Nebraska, 

US Sunday, April 26, 2026, 06:55:56 AM

When you say to someone “art”, I think the most common reaction is for the image of a drawing, paining or sculpture; of music or literature or theater; of dance or religion; or cinema; of architecture or perhaps gastronomy to rise to mind.

Every one of those things points to an artwork, more accurately a work of Fine Art. There are many other … less than “Fine” … arts of course. This is because every artwork in the Arts consists of three parts, or three aspects: (1) the vision that brought it to the artist's … or creator's ... mind (which is metaphysical by nature, and by definition), and (2) the crafting (skill … consisting of knowledge, or understanding, and abilities) that (3) brought it into an existence that transcends the metaphysical, i.e. that made it physical. This definition applies to things produced by fine artists … and other than "Fine" Arts.

I recall that in July of 1975, after searching the streets of Zürich's Old Town District for some hours, I came upon the bar, or pub, that housed the Cabaret Voltaire on the second floor in 1916. I was gobsmacked to find that it had become a discotheque in what was by then the “Disco Era,” which I thought of in my surprisingly withered American mind, as some sort of short lived fad … much as many in 1916 must have thought of Dadaism. I sat down, had a beer, sighed and went on my way.

Looking back I reflect that the avowed purpose of Dadaism was to destroy the very foundations of European culture that had led to World War I; foundations which they, as artists, felt were embodied in the Fine Arts. They meant to fish around for some new standards for the Fine Arts to replace what they considered the old, obsolete and perverse Aristocratic and bourgeois standards. So they, of course, looked to the new, unexpected, Bohemian, and often perverse, hoping to see new ways of finding creative and unconsidered standards; taking the mind and spirit to alternate ways of approaching life, hopefully with the effect of bypassing the destruction of entire populations and millions of lives in politician's and business-men's wars.

So … I was really not justified in finding, especially in the heart of the Dadaist universe, a fad attempting to become the norm; and it was, in fact “Art”: … Disco and Dada.

I am at one with the Dadaists in this: Art is so very much bigger than we allow. The first step in understanding this is to try and grasp what Art is: (1) the artist's mind (2) crafting mediums that (3) bring into a physicality ... which transcends the metaphysical ─ i.e. the imagination.

Mediums abound, far beyond those represented by what we call the Fine Arts. But all of them attempt to make the unreal real. This abundance of mediums are what I call Oneiric Art, as opposed to Fine Art ─ although they are both encompassed by the same definition, with "Fine Art" being limited by varying academic criteria. Oneirc Art encompasses  mediums far beyond the traditional ones isolated behind a wall ... or proscenium or frame ... called “The Fine Arts”. I would say that one of the most ignored arts is “Magic”; not just stage magic, but all kinds of magic, religious magic, and even spy craft, and political misdirection ─ the most despicable, perhaps, of Oneiric Arts, but something that nonetheless attempts every day to make the unreal, real, too often to its unending shame, yet sometimes to its unending esteem.

Another type of Oneiric Art is fashion; not the Fashion of Paris, Milan, Rome, or New York, but rather the everyday “fashion” of people who take the products of those places (old and new) to paint themselves with makeup, mold themselves with hairstyles, adorn themselves with Fashion Runway (old and new) outfits, and appear at their choicest restaurants to make their exterior reality what they imagine themselves to be. Even dialects evolve to make the unreal real, some music of language hidden deep in the soul that finds its expression in every day speech. … Far out, dude!

This all focuses on only one of the three aspects of art: mediums that embody the physicality of a vision. At the heart of vision is poetry; not poetry the medium of words or verbal sound, but the non-physical thing that one might call the potential of imagination. It follows that at the heart of every Fine art is “poetry,”

However, we are visual creatures, and in this sense, perhaps one might say that “art” is the potential of (the visual) imagination. Yet when we see graphic or plastic art metaphysically, we are not seeing photons, but rather something essentially unreal represented by photons. The same may be said of poetry: in our minds we hear not sound, but rather something essentially unreal represented by sound.

So what is this in the mind, this metaphysical reality, that is passed to us from others in the form of both photons and sound … and touch and taste and odor? Simply put it is metaphor; and metaphor is most directly explored in poetry. So perhaps the essence of the Fine Arts (and religion ─ I consider that religion also shares much in common with the arts) are not poetry, but poetics … or the poetical.

I would define "Oneiric Art", therefore, as those Arts that make the unreal (metaphysical), real (physical and clearly defined in the viewer's imagination), for those who are exposed to the art,  whatever their medium or  purpose.