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Read his most interesting post-retreat reflections posted at his ErikandTheAnimals blog, including these thought-provoking questions:

How should it be taught, what is an artist’s responsibility to their society, what freedoms should artist be allowed that are beyond the norm, what is good art and what good comes of good art, and so on. How do you place any restrictions on art at all without censoring expression in a negative way?

With regard to the last question, my perspective is that, realistically, there will never again be restrictions placed on artists that aren't placed upon all citizens. Ours is an age that is 'post-taboo' and so our canvases can be colored in infinite ways. Mediums and channels of distribution present their own technical/formal restrictions, of course. Yet beyond these formal limits there are, so to speak, a kind of set of restrictions that artists deal with. These are not imposed but are rather present in our genetic makeup. I speak of humans capacity to be able to respond to artwork. It is the last chain of the circuit that connects subjective artist intuition with subjective audience intuition through the objective artwork.

My composition teacher, W.A. Mathieu, has taught me to consider what the human ear can reasonably be expected to hear and process. I could put any and all notes I want into one of my compositions, but the reality is that the average human ears are only going to be able to really hear—and thus truly resonate—with certain of the notes in certain patterns and combinations. The artistry of composition, in fact, involves skillfully dancing on the edge of the known and the unknown, in ways that keep the ears of the audience simultaneously engaged and in a rapture of surprise. These lines and limits of perception are pre-given to a certain extent (only tones in a certain frequency range can be perceived, for example), but also evolve. Our ears tolerate far more sonic ambiguity than those of previous epochs of culture.

The same goes for human speech, when we can or cannot process what someone who speaks unconventionally has to say. People are able to hear at different tempos, but everyone has some linguistic velocity that is too fast for comprehension. If you carry this principle through all the arts, you will find that aesthetic response factors everywhere, in theory. (See my essay on Abigail Housen's aesthetic-response research here.)

Thus the multifaceted area of audience response is a de facto limit, not on what artists can make, but on what artists can make and reasonably expect will be understood and absorbed by audiences. As Housen's work suggests (not proves), people operate at different levels, or stages, of aesthetic response. At the extremes, some people see next to nothing in art but their own egocentrism, and some people are able to suspend all disbelief and intuitively and objectively absorb artwork at extremely discreet emotional touch-points.

My overall point is this—audience response does act as a humanistic limit upon artwork, but that does not mean the imposition of hard and fast rules upon artwork production or artist intentions. The artwork is a holon—a whole unto itself as the product of the free artist's intuition extended into form; and a part of a larger negotiation of meaning between the presented object, the artist's intentions, and the audience response. Many artists, and art lovers, seem to favor either the wholeness or the partness of the art object; few persuasively show that they favor the holonic view of artwork, which in fact is the most accurate and truthful.

In some ways, you still never quite know how people are going to respond to your artwork, response theory (and all theories) aside. At the heart of the artwork game resides a deep, profound mystery, for both artists and audiences alike. To the extent something such as this could be called a 'certainty', it is. Our attempts to understand the artwork process beyond that fact can be informed, educated, planet-centric, and scrupulous, but at the bottom line, we are all flailing in the wind, as so much sand blown asway on the beach of a great, nameless ocean.