Contributed by Lucas Moran / Painting has died a thousand ersatz deaths, but artists are not immune to despair. Many of us are wondering what it’s all for. Nobody is buying art and we’re all grappling with media addiction. Through a haze of distress and distraction over political and cultural collapse, it’s tempting to dismiss traditional arguments for the importance of art even as a refuge from crisis. But that’s the attitude the billionaires and robots want us to adopt, wresting us so completely from joy and beauty that we remain glued to our tiny screens, held captive by reminders and notifications. Some of us keep trying to show anyone willing to look up that the world is a much bigger place. Rauschenberg achieved that kind of jolt in the 1950s with Monogram – a taxidermized Angora goat with a tire around its midsection, standing on a painted and collaged canvas laid horizontally on a platform. Perhaps to be an effective painter in the current existential mess, you need to show us your goat  In his solo show “Compression” at D.D.D.D. gallery, Jan Dickey valiantly tries. His new large-scale works made me want to yell about painting what Dr. Frankenstein yelled about his monster: “It’s alive!”