About Those Animal Spirits

 Recently I have come across the term "animal spirits" in the news.  It's in connection with the stock market, and some of the wild drops that have occurred recently.  Looking online, it seems to be an economic term that relates to stock market approaches that are more instinctual than logical.  I never studied economics, but rather all my degrees are in art, so I come to it that way.

Back in 2012, the Belmar Arts Council decided to hold a show called "Animal Spirits", which had a theme of animals in art.  Any medium, as long as the art was built on animal imagery.  It's not a focus of my art, but I'm not against it either, and I like a good challenge.  My interpretation was to do a still life of bottles of alcohol with images of animals on the labels, literally animal spirits.  I seem to be the only one who did this, based on what I remember of the show.  Actually I ended up with two pieces in the exhibition, one of which (an older one) sold, so it was a good day.  My newer piece is below:

I haven't seen this one in a while, and hadn't thought about it recently, but obviously the frequent use of the term "animal spirits" brought it back to mind.  I don't think I've shown it since then, and considering the hundreds of prints I have made, this one from over a decade ago has not been a priority.  I'm not even sure where the block is right now.  But up until this time, I had assumed that the title was dreamed up by whoever decided to organize the show.  Now I have to wonder if the title came from this economic term and if someone knew that and decided to create a show with that title, even though the theme itself was more about animals.   My memory is that the show had a lot of dogs and cats.