Old shoes, new feet

To the extent that we wish to see the world in it's complexity and richness, we are obliged to open our eyes, ears and consciousness. Our preferred methods of seeing/hearing/touching, etc. dissuade us from seeking out difference, so comfortable are we with the somnambular quality of the present popular art-forms.
The entire notion of "music television" is reworked pop radio strategies from the last 40 years. The only "development" seems to be the addition of orchestrated video supplements that do very little but provide visual invigoration.
Museums have historically been used to "authorize and certify art". In our present situation, we have inherited the pastiche of a "fine art" while offering cliche as Post/P/P-Modernist masterpieces. The unification of High and Low Art types has "unified" the artworld, so to speak, but done nothing to improve the quality of the artistic discourse.If a picture is worth a thousand words, then our culture is undoubtedly busy obscuring our situation through a veritable deluge of language which serves little to free us from a dependence on the "tried and true".
The imperial push of Western culture defined by an ideal of "diversity in homogeneity", (more notoriously ideologized in the American motto "E Pluribus Unum")provides a vast field of activity, much of it already familiar. But familiarity breeds contempt, and disaffection isn't far behind, yet we are wont to seek the "truly new". The originality of the unorthodox, the art of iconoclasm, the power of rejection and renunciation to affect through dismissal, these revelatory qualities of our curiosity are confined, tamed if you will through the power of institutionalized aesthetics, an actualized ethic of perceptual awareness.
What we have seen will limit what we can see. The paradoxical experience of novelty/judging(assessment of familiarity) is the essence of our dilemma. To see a thing, we compare it to other things we have experienced. The classes of beings in our natural history, all the phylla, genus, families, etc serve as testament to our world-view and the inherent order we impose on the world in order to be able to understand it.
Yet, understanding as a ritual gives rise to a hubris of the intellect. Safe and secure in our preferred cosmologies, we become convinced of the certainty of what we know. Perhaps this explains why we use so little of our brains in the course of living. The comfort of epistemic "certitude" leads to a double bind. We "know", but we have to "unknow"/forget/renounce this epistemology while depending upon its use to acquire new knowledge.