Why be an artist?

Today wanted to to talk about an interesting question I encountered while scrolling my facebook feed. It was one of those text images, where the medium of a jpg is used solely to carry text, that can’t be copied. Ironically I have a feeling, that such images are the most reproduced luggage on the web, apart from the obvious big P.

The text this time wasn’t a fictitious quote from Albers Einstein or the like but rather a simple question: Why be an artist? I usually binge scroll on such occasions, taking in the totality of the screen without any reciprocal effect, at least conscious as far as I am aware, but this time I did stop. And I replied:

Some see more than others, even though looking in the same direction. It’s not so much being an artist — everyone is an artist, not by choice, but by nature. Ideally a person becomes a carpenter by profession because he or she likes the specific causality, that belongs to carpentry, that is to make something into something else, constrained by the conceptual barrier of the idea of carpentry. So does the accountant, and the banker … The artist in us all is only the feature, that allows us to see a table when others see a tree, see profit when others see a collection of numbers. It’s not the why, that is important, it’s within what field and with what particular act, that is.

If your not happy with the idea, that its hard to sell paintings, it’s not being an artist that bothers you, it’s the act of painting and selling paintings, that you have a problem with. You have artists in banking and marketing, because it’s not important what you create, it is the act of creation and the joy and pleasure that it brings. Maybe it’s time to stop pondering about why and to start figuring out how. And mind you, this is not the motivational why; it’s impossibly important to know why we do what we do, but the universal why. The one you don’t have to like, only understand.

This idea of everyone as artist is a recurring phenomenon since the start of the 20th century, with movements like Fluxus, and maybe most widely known even before that with Duchamp’s masterpiece and/or joke Fountain from 1917. You can also find the cynical side of this argument comically depicted in Paolo Sorrentino’s This must be the place, when Cheyenne, played by Shean Penn is talking with a man in a bar somewhere in New Mexico. The man tells him he makes tattoos for a living, to witch he ads that he doesn’t view it as work, but as art. Cheyenne replies with a question; if he had noticed that nobody works anymore, nowadays everybody’s an artist.

It’s not hard to be an artist, unless one gives up on his or her own will to create for him or herself. That’s the cog in the machine you hear being thrown around in mostly liberal conversations. If you’re not the proverbial cog, you are by default capable to be an artist. And you don’t become an artist by going to art school and getting your BA or MA, be it at Caltech or a random dump of an art school. You merely learn the basic tools of the trade there. But if you work on those tools and yourself, and if you put in the effort, you can call yourself an artist if you wish.

The term artist nowadays has become vague beyond comprehension. It doesn’t mean what most people think it means, as much as being wealthy doesn’t mean what most of us think it means. Most people think that being wealthy is a place, the end point of a journey, but it’s not. It’s a state of mind, a function that reinforces itself, as much as being an artist is a state of mind. We are born artistic, because it is our nature that makes us such, but the same as being born healthy, one becomes sick, most of the time not because of inherent issues, but because of wilful blindness and a fictional idea of how the world works and that this one hamburger won’t do any difference. It doesn’t by itself, but nothing in life happens by itself, everything is a sequence of events, and each minuscule part only enforces the grand image.

The same is with being an artist, you don’t keep this skill because being human gives you some inherent right to it; open any guide book on how to become rich or happy or any other desirable, you will find that there is a simple but profound law, working in the background of anyone of us: What you don’t use, you lose. And if the only method of practicing creation and the careful attention that produces the quality of our creations is a concept we use to tuck ourselves in at night, a mantra with no substance: I am an artist.

Well it’s just not going to work. And you end up questioning it, like many of us do a lot of the time. Why. Why be an artist? Well that’s simple. It’s your nature. But how to be one, what to do with it that’s the real question. What can you do with your particular skill set in your particular environment, with your particular friends and colleagues at a particular time, that’s the question.

And here’s the bummer: Many of us don’t know what to do, apart from the urge we feel, that we need to do it. And guess what, down the line, this path leads to dread and despair, it’s impossibly hard to have enough attention to see problems around you, but not enough to see what could be done about them. And most liberal professors don’t help by pumping their ideologies of changing the world and only enforcing the realisation of how broken everything actually is. It is broken. But it was always broken, and probably will be forever.

But this isn’t the point, it’s that you have to put in the work to be able to be artistic. And that you don’t need to paint or sculpt or perform in a theatre to do so. Everyone can be an artist in their own field, and only when people will start seeing that an excellent financial advisor is as much an artist as a sculptor, will they start to appreciate the “high” arts with the dignity and respect that they deserve. And yes, even the weird unintelligible conceptual stuff. Because high art is an ode to the ability of playful creation what we are capable as human beings. And with the words of Seth Godin, who has written magnificent books on this topic, and I encourage anyone interested to give them a try:

“The only people who get paid enough, get paid what they’re worth, are people who don’t follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map. That option is now available to everyone, so take it.”

---

Link to Seth Godin's Book Linchpin:

https://amzn.to/2mrCFJ4

—

SOCIAL MEDIA

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/surviving.art
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/survivingart
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Surviving_art
Webpage: https://www.survivingart.com