My writing feels more accessible to me than ever before. Yes, I still have to deal with my ADHD uprooting my routines and efforts, but I don’t blame myself or beat myself up over it. These stories will have room to breathe and matu…

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“Art is responsible, important, sensible.”

- Amie McNee in “We Need Your Art: Stop F*cking Around and Make Something,”

This sentence confounds me more than anything; it’s difficult to remember or articulate, but it’s self-evident enough to be forgettable.

I think it’s time we all deconstruct our own artistic shame. Think back to all the times you were told to pursue anything other than your art, the times you were told the most lucrative way to make your art, and dissuade you from doing what felt right, what felt aligned.

This isn’t to say that these messages came to us through malice or ignorance. Likely, you remember a fellow artist telling you to supplement your art with real stable income, or steered you away from the artist’s way due to their own struggles. These messages all come from a place of wanting better for you - security and safety.

But this is also part of what needs to be deconstructed. If we learn to de-legitimize ourselves and spread doubt among our own ranks, what hope do we have of making the real world impact we’re supposed to?

If anything, we shouldn’t be watering ourselves or each other down in an effort to make the struggle less painful. Now more than ever, we need to realize our potency is part of the solution.

Yes, making money is not a guarantee in this line of work, but that doesn’t mean that your regular 9-5 job deserves all the best fruits of your labor, or even count as your life’s work.

It isn’t fair that creative success feels like trying to win the lottery. So many facets of our modern world, all the work put into it and taken out of it, so many of us are not properly appreciated for the essential work we do.

To think we were told that our life’s purpose and expression was frivolous and worthless, when we’re living in the same reality where doctors are understaffed and under-supported. Farmers are underpaid and swimming in debt just to keep their farms from going under. Are we really supposed to think that the same social contract that is failing the legitimately essential work of doctors and farmers, who keep us all alive and fed, are also being devalued?

Yeah, I call bullshit.

The professionals who provide life’s essential services should be the most well-off and respected among us, based off the words by the powers that be, who simultaneously preach the frivolousness of art by their own estimation.

Then why aren’t they respected more?

Doctors and farmers show up to work, spent and struggling, because they know they are important, responsible, and sensible. They know they have to, or else the fabric of human civilization will fall apart completely.

What crushing pressure!

If only we artists took our work just as seriously.

If we all just stopped showing up, gave up, and threw away our calling to explore and express the human condition through the most intriguing and visceral mediums at our disposal, how would human civilization actually collapse?

Even as I am writing this, I am bumping up against my artistic shame. Would civilization really collapse if every artist abandoned their craft for the sake of a steady job?

Then I must ask this: is a civilization without culture, or even a less robust culture, really a living civilization?

If our culture is dead, do we even count as human anymore?

If our food is dead, do we count as living organisms anymore?

If our bodies are dead, do we count as alive anymore?

No.

Digging up old clay pots, inscribed with pictographs and filled with tools and trinkets of a bygone era, proves to us that culture and art are backbones to a human civilization that feels still alive while being actually dead - what remains are echos of that once vibrant life.

Art informs and comes from culture, and culture is uniquely human and usually outlives us. Culture is our human spirit being relished and shared across space and time. When archeologists find old relics in the dirt and sand, those lost cultures connect to us and feel alive to us, because they are alive, through the art left behind.

Art is human spirit captured in a capsule that can outlive even the most robust of civilizations.

How can that not be considered important, responsible, or sensible?

It’s important that we connect with one another through storytelling, culture, and expression, because we have to remember that we are all human, hence, on the same side.

It’s responsible to share art because when we feel alone or disconnected, there is an ephemeral way to connect our hearts and minds through paintings, music, and writing. It keeps us tapped in to our own existence, which can seem meaningless otherwise.

It’s sensible to create, because we live on a plane of existence that is constantly disintegrating and expanding and growing colder, and we only have so long before that entropy will take us along with it. We create to fill the silence and space with evidence of who we are and what we believed in.

Doctors are essential in a world ruled by entropy, farmers are essential in a world constantly regenerating, and artists are essential because they are the doctors and farmers of the human spirit.

Believing simultaneously that art is good, yet unimportant my whole life- like it’s an afterthought, subconsciously told me I was the same... a nice afterthought.

If art is not important, then my entire person-hood is also not important, which is a crazy piece of information to uncover.

Anyway, what flavor did your artistic shame come in?

Leave a comment

If you want to read the unofficial part 1 of this essay, check out

“Are we told to devalue artists?”

See, this is a personal dilemma I find myself in now. I have a very, very, nebulous writing project that just refuses to say “when.”

I’ve been working on something that is very short, but at the same time, very long.

If you are writing, when do you know you’ve finished a project, like FINISHED-finished?

No, I’m really asking. I am desperate to have this project under my belt and would love to hear from my fellow craftsmen and artists.

If you are painting, when are the final touches done being applied? Is it an internal feeling or an external circumstance? When you are sculpting or recording, how many times do you chip away at a sculpture or add to a song when it already seems like a full piece?

For me, it’s all confusing. Writing nonfiction or essays always seems to have it’s own end point.

To me, there’s an external and an internal element.

In a lot of cases, we are academically taught when the piece we are working on is finished, what the signs look like, what steps have to be taken at the end of the creative process, and how to vet the effectiveness of our work as a whole. In reality though, it’s kind of left up to a feeling.

A feeling of completion? Just an emptiness that signifies that everything was left on the canvas, page, track, etc.?

Maybe I’m waxing too poetically about the subject, but I think each serious artist has to contend with this problem at some point in their journey.

Do we all end up writing “The End” for our own personal reasons, or is there a sequence that just runs its course before we can call it?

Also… what if you don’t want it to be over? What then? What are we getting out of the experience that we are reluctant to let end? Or perhaps we know the end and just aren’t ready to face it?

I think my point is, artists ultimately decide when a piece of art is finished… because it could just go on forever.

If you never stop creating one particular thing, reveling in the experience of creating it, it’s still just a work-in-progress until the end of the author’s life.

Maybe what I’m really trying to say is that… art is never really finished. It’s just kind of stopped at some point, and it’s up to someone to decide when that point is.

Some art is more esoteric - abstract - and ends quickly enough, making that the point. Others are filled to the brim with world-building, accents of color, Easter eggs, and compendiums galore before the author is forced to put down the pen.

When it is presented for wider consumption: is that a signal that it is “good enough” to be considered finished? Are we, as consumers of media and art, truly seeing something that is finished, or perhaps it could be some half-baked attempt at a much wider vision by the creator?

So, by my own estimation, all art is just something we are witnessing that could be taken even further.

All art is incomplete. It just refuses to be more than what it is. Whoever chooses to present it as is with no further elaboration or decoration is the ultimate creator of the piece, I suppose.

If it’s an indie author, most likely, you’re reading something actually by the author. If it’s a web serial or limited series, it’s likely the final work of the network, since they make the budget and the time constraints. If it’s a blockbuster movie franchise, it’s some TV writer and editor’s amalgamation of some other author or comic writer’s original work.

That is the person who ultimately sends the message of the art - what it’s meant to teach us, meant to show us, or connect with us as consumers of art.

Though, I like the term “patrons of art” better as a concept, let’s call us what we are: we are consumers. And perhaps, consumers are being treated as a final authority on endings a little too closely - or we think we should be.

This isn’t meant to be a jab at people who are mourning the end of a beloved series or franchise that changed the way they see art or the human psyche, and I am by no means devaluing their take on what could have done to wrap the characters and story-lines up in a nice, satisfying bow; just that, all art must find its ending through someone’s perspective, no matter if we agree with that perspective or not.

Or perhaps not? Haven’t we all wondered what something might have been like from our own estimation of the ending of something that didn’t end the way we wanted? Have you ever been grateful something ended differently than what you expected?

Are we thinking our contribution to art as its consumers is too important than it really should be? Whose opinion or take on the end of a beloved piece of art are we truly disagreeing with (to put it mildly in some cases)?

As a creative person, I can see how the ending is simultaneously the entire point of a piece and yet entirely dependent on factors that might be out of our hands.

Good art can be agreed upon by a list of factors, but art as a practice, as an experience, just doesn’t have one. It could go on forever if you let it.

Even the art we love, revere, or just enjoy as consumers could have evolved and elaborated into something entirely different if the artist had decided otherwise. And we shall never know what it could have been, only what it is.

So, art is forever, because its ending is subjective, like it’s meaning, its purpose, and its license to exist in the first place.

Which is why endings are so difficult. Or maybe not. If you have finished something recently and felt just… nothing - relief at having it in its form and nothing more - I’d love to hear about that experience.

Am I overthinking this process? Am I about to finish something tantamount to a magnum opus, or am I just experiencing growing pains?

Come what may, let’s remember that we are the authors of our art and its fate, unless we relinquish that power to someone else. Making peace with an ending is a rite and privilege that all of us should be able to experience at least once in our journeys.

Don’t you agree?

I’d love to hear from you on this topic! Leave a public comment or subscribe to join the FLBC chat to kick start this conversation.

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