With regard to essence and strategies of affect, there are no two vocations more closely affined than those of the artist and the magician. Of course we speak of the art of magic by which we mean the thoroughgoing processes of magical enactment and the unique and indubitable skills of the magician. Conversely, we also speak of the magical power of art, by which we refer to the ability of art to arrest, enchant, mesmerize, or indeed hold us engrossed in the deepest emotions close to religious experience. However, there is far more to the affinities between the two vocations, than the metaphorical interpolations of language. One may deal with the ephemeral and illusory, the fleeting, while the other deals with greater concreteness and sometimes, permanence, and one may dwell on immediacy, drama, and the surfaces of transient enchantment while the other is often solitary and more contemplative and philosophical; yet the two are fundamentally engaged in the same preoccupation, the oldest of all, which is the alteration of the universe.

As performers both the artist and the magician appeal to the same emotion, feeling, for although the common inclination is to foreground the senses, especially sight, with regard to art and magic, it is nevertheless passion, emotion, feeling, and the unique ability of our species to give rein to these at will, that is, to alternate between the reign of reason and the rule of emotion, that give them substance and sustenance. We need not appeal to the sophistries of phenomenology in order to establish that neither art not magic exists without faith or the will to accept the object, arrangement, moment, or situation in the guise in which it is presented to us; to suspend the faculty of absolute reason and submit instead to the elemental dictates of sentiment so as to allow the realization of that hitherto non-existent object, moment or situation that we designate as art or magic.

In order to work, magic demands an emotional and psychic investment from its audience in the form of unconscious submission to illusion, a willingness to be mesmerized. Even the greatest and cleverest magician recognizes that without the suspension of logic on the part of the audience, or total extrication, albeit momentary, from the holds of cynical reason, and the willingness to accept and believe in the possibility of that which lies beyond logic, no magic act can be guaranteed to succeed. We enable magic by substituting faith for reason while collectively and unanimously granting exception to the agent of this transformation, namely the magician, so that her power of logic and intellect may override and command ours to submission. Magic derives from our innate, pristine desire for enchantment and wonder, and the will to reach beyond the limits of the physical realm in search of awe and rapture. We invest in and embrace magic, therefore, because with it we are able to satiate this longing for wonder.

As we have realized in the past century by understudying and learning from the art traditions of Africa, Oceania and other non-industrial cultures, there are parallels between the processes of projection and psychic investment which enable magic, and the strategies of transference through which an object or situation ceases to be merely that which it is in nature; stone, wood, a jar of liquid, a daub of paint, and instead acquires the status and distinction of a work of art. In time we have come to accept that the essence of a work of art is not in the outward form that we manufacture through a combination of manual and imaginative skills, but more in the transformative, spiritual and emotional investment which removes the object from the realm of the mundane, irrespective of its formal attributes, and places it in that mystical interstice between the temporal and the divine which is the locus of the transcendent. In other words, we are able to inject or strip the object of its art essence in same way that we may invest a situation or act with the power to take us beyond the inhibitions of logic and rationality and engorge our vision of the possible.

There is, of course, a school of thought which conceives of magic as mere conceit, or an entertaining business of trickery and con in which the skilled treat an unknowing or willing public to thrilling sessions of optical illusion. The boom in show-magicianship, which entertainers like Ehrich Weiss aka Harry Houdini and numerous others promoted in the early 20th century, and the ever-growing trade in magic tricks and feel-good spiritualism that followed, did much to undermine popular understanding of the meaning and essence of magic. Houdini’s own opportunistic campaign to expose the trickeries of commercial spiritualism in America drove him to seek to secularize our understanding of magic so as to divest it of all associations with the spiritual. However, there is a lot more to magic than conceit, and the enduring appeal of the magical points to the fact that magic is much more than a routine of clever tricks. It is revealing that the most popular film in recent times, J. K. Rowling’s fairytale of Harry Potter, should be a fantasy of magic and sorcery.

Besides satiating our need for enchantment and rapture, magic serves also as the cornerstone of myth, which, as Joseph Campbell pointed out in his classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” “Religions,” Campbell reminded us, “philosophies, arts…prime discoveries in science and technology…boil up from the basic magic ring of myth.” At the center of myth is the hero, who is a distillation of all that we are, value, and adore, all that we wish we could be; the mortal approximation of the gods through whom we may fulfill ourselves in the realm of the ideal, the perfect man. To accomplish the superhuman feats for which society creates him, the hero must turn to magic. Whether it comes in form of a potion or a mythic bird, magic enables the hero to broach those thresholds of the imagination across which neither science nor reason can take us. Without the paths of mystery that magic opens for the hero, human imagination runs up against a barricade and our narratives of survival end in a cul-de-sac. Magic throws ajar the gates of mythic possibility so that the hero may take us beyond mortality. The most important role of magic in culture, therefore, is not in the theatre hall or on television, but in the realm of the imagination, and this is as evident and indispensable today, as it was at the beginning of time.

In same vein, also, there has emerged since the late 20th century a school of thought, which conceives of art as a business of conceit whereby the artist cons the public to accept vacuous frivolity as art and take empty signs for wonders. The arguable preponderance of the mundane in contemporary art, and the ever-present predilection among artists to ply their eccentricity in the marketplace, seem to lend credence to this logic. However, it is essential not to confuse the artist’s vocation in essence, with the clever tricks of cultural mercantilism, or what I call the culture game. The idea of art as mere conceit is a troubling proposition because it touches on one of the very fundaments of culture itself, which is society’s faith in art and the integrity of the artist. Art, strictly speaking, is not a sleight of hand. Even when society comes to the artist for mere entertainment, it still expects a modicum of transfigurative profundity in the aesthetic encounter. Wherever society loses faith in the artist, art slips inevitably into redundancy, and whenever art becomes redundant, culture as a whole suffers incalculably.

For as long as we recognize the imperfections in our existence, and are willing to accept that science and reason, and their marvelous tools of logic are nevertheless inadequate to smooth these imperfections, for as long as we desire, upon this realization, to cause the inexistent to exist and make the impossible possible, we will require art and magic for only through these can we translate the ruminations of our imagination into those narratives, objects, and situations that fertilize our world and fulfill our existence.

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