The artist’s fragility is their naivety
-W.E.
Are we that romantically inclined that we don’t see the folly in our ways sometimes? Do we think that we really posses that much power to effectuate change?
Ink on paper, paint on canvas, melody to ears, engineering marvels, social change, humanity’s enrichment, artists of all the sciences in the background, working to effectuate change.
I personally believe we don’t posses enough power and we are naive.
In and of itself the art barely penetrates a few insightful souls, but I also believe that it’s from our sheer will and resistance that we can and do cause changes. It’s our stubbornness to relentlessly continue that does cause people to finally pay attention, granted, if there is art to present in the first place.
The current dichotomy here is the muffled cry of current crop of supposed artists. They cry, ‘the arts, the arts, save the arts’. Their complaint is that all the arts are dying and being paid less attention to.
I disagree. The arts are alive and well, it’s just that we have a myriad of mummy and daddy princes and princesses who were told or learned that they can be whatever they wanted to be. So with no talent in their pockets, they wish to barter their ‘individuality’ on to the world by force.
The world has no need for shit on a canvas, or plagiarised ‘ebb and flow’ prose.
It has need for art that is contemporary that the current generations can identify with or even classical art of any type that rises up and meets the standard of the masters left before, for us to marvel at.
Don’t expect that getting tattoos of treble clefts and painting your arm in a sleeve of Salvador Dali’s surrealism, a piercing or two, or hating the world with your recycled op shop clothes and scowl on your face walking and living in a hipster town makes you an artist. That doesn’t make you an individual. That makes you a conformist. That makes you a copycat of all the rest of your peers trying to do the same thing.
Ayn Rand said, “There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non conformist.”
In a nutshell, she summarised the current crop of complainers and wannabes. One sentence is all it took. She didn’t need the libel I have just spewed above.
Why? Because SHE is an artist.
Garb and appearances never made the artist.
Work, borderline genius if not extreme genius work is what makes artists.
Rise up out of your slums and contribute to the arts if you can’t by your pure artistry, then acknowledging your ineptitude and being a poets muse, a painters assistant, a musicians roady or a body at a protest for change. Do something in the background until your art takes form and you can be an artist but remain humble, remain doubtful. Don’t pompously think that because you can put a sentence together or slap paint on canvas that you’re automatically Byron or Pollock. Don’t think because you can strum a guitar or rock a mic you’re Clapton or NWA.
Don’t think you’re anything and if you really are something, the world will think you’re everything
-W.E.
lonerloaner 