It can be difficult these days to create art. Art is an abstracted way of speaking to the world at large, over the boundaries of time and distance, and it’s very difficult to remain motivated to articulate ideas into concrete form when the future is so uncertain and everything nearby is so harsh and ugly, collapsing daily into cruelty and idiocy. Sending out these signals requires a certain degree of faith that somewhere, someday, out there in the world those signals will be received and valued. These days that faith feels harder to come by.
On the one hand, this feels like a sign that I should be doing Something to Fix It: I don’t know what that is, but something. I could probably be doing more than I am to effect positive change in the world, but any attempt to confront that idea inevitably just dunks me in hot anxiety sauce and ends up just leaving me less inclined to do anything whatsoever. So, rather than that, I’m inclined to just keep making things anyway, whether or not they’re good or desired, and thereby place a vote of confidence. There will be a future. There will be a world for my work to exist in.
Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve picked up the sense that it’s intrinsically less noble to create for an audience than it is to create to indulge some sort fundamental creative urge. It is kind of an absurd belief when examined – after all, what is art without an audience? Just a box of echoes. The underlying logic for this belief goes something like this: Creating art just for the money is what sellouts do, right? But money is a commodification of attention and appreciation, and therefore if you create art for attention and appreciation you’re still a sellout. Of course, you can’t communicate anything or influence anyone at all without their attention and appreciation, so by that logic all successful artists are sellouts. This is complete horseshit at basically every step along the way, but it sounds extremely reasonable if you have the sort of brain predisposed to accept such ideas (I do), and provides a handy outlet for sabotaging your own creative output. In case you were looking for such a thing.
I have this weird shame over wanting to be seen, over wanting my work to be appreciated, which is intensely at odds with everything I actually value in the world. I value art because of the impact it’s had on me, the way it’s affected my outlook and expanded my sense of what’s possible, the sense of unattainable and ethereal beauty it’s led me to seek and which the crass outer world seems so hostile towards. It is absolutely absurd to feel ashamed for wanting to have that same impact, to participate in the same tradition – and, even if I may disagree with the tenets of capitalism, that means accepting money for art and paying money for art, because that’s how we’re able to show that we care about things now. (Yes, that means that in this model rich people have about a million times the capacity for caring as poor people do. It’s a terrible model, but it’s the one we’re operating in). In the end, it’s not necessarily so important that my voice in particular be heard, but it is vital to me that my voice join with others, that my creation joins this tradition, and connect the past to the present to the future – a future which will definitely, definitely, probably still be waiting when I get there.