At Artocratic we are, unashamedly, still asking a lot of the same questions we began pondering during late nights between beer runs in high school:
What are we to make of this existence thing? Who's calling the shots? Who are "WE?" And who are the supposed "everyone ELSE"? What's our love affair with life on Earth all about? And what that we don't necessarily love do we repeatedly wrangle with as artists and humanitarians?
Over Under-Tybee Island
Ann Tracy
Photograph
We are always searching for clues, and we strive to remember to look for them in the most obvious places.
At Artocratic, we posit that human lives are, in a real sense, artistic responses to the world, continually evolving reactions to others' responses. Like bees, flying around, gathering unique combinations of pollens that then flavor our individual honey – the consequence of our being. From what flowers does your honey take its flavor? We find we're compelled to know.
Why we're in this: Simply put, the editors are honored to be acquainted (by varying degrees of separation) with some really damn interesting people. And we're sure that other wildly interesting and provocative people frequent those people's friends' dinner tables as well. Artocratic is our desire to build an online dinner party – a forum for all to weigh in on the above questions and more. Please feel free to wander in and join the conversation, even if you don't know us yet. I.e., submissions are encouraged.
What's our flavor? Artocratic's exploration is as much intellectual as aesthetic, as concerned with here-and-now earthly existence as with the probability of an ineffable, co-created, present-future-past whose knowability has barely been scratched. We are interested in the forces that affect our lives, both those that are beyond human conscious intention or control and those fully within our jurisdiction.
Wherever it may occur, the intersection of art and humanity's grappling with the mystery is this magazine's fascination. Artocratic welcomes all perspectives that illuminate any of these or their confluence, in the form of essays, interviews, dialogues, short fiction, poetry, scholarly articles, how-to guides, puzzles, audio and visual art, music, performance art, video, multi-modal works; pieces that range from tiny to huge both in terms of length and profundity.