Deconstructing Artistic Shame
If art is not important, then my entire person-hood is also not important, which is a crazy piece of information to uncover
βArt is responsible, important, sensible.β
- Amie McNee in βWe Need Your Art: Stop F*cking Around and Make Something,β
This sentence confounds me more than anything; itβs difficult to remember or articulate, but itβs self-evident enough to be forgettable.
I think itβs 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 isnβt 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 artistβs 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 weβre supposed to?
If anything, we shouldnβt 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 doesnβt mean that your regular 9-5 job deserves all the best fruits of your labor, or even count as your lifeβs work.
It isnβt 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 lifeβs purpose and expression was frivolous and worthless, when weβre 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 lifeβs 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 arenβt 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?
Itβs 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.
Itβs 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.
Itβs 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 itβs 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?
If you want to read the unofficial part 1 of this essay, check out