I’ve always been rather serious about art. It’s more about obsession than fun and it often carries the burden and the zeal of a religion. There’s this notion that all the mistakes I’ve ever made, anything I might consider foolish or shameful, is somehow made right by creating something that transcends myself – something that somehow taps into the universal and eternal. I love the way art can turn ugliness into beauty and bring order to what can seem so cruel and random. The flip side of this is a constant dissatisfaction with whatever I create and a feeling of almost frantic discomfort when I don’t feel I’ve created enough.
How much is enough? I don’t know. I’ve written and recorded over sixty songs, finished a novel, designed the websites I use to promote all of this and… that just doesn’t seem like much after having done it. What I do think a lot about is whether I’ll write another song or book and whether they’ll be any good. Or about how I haven’t worked hard enough to market what I have created. Marketing has always seemed like a dark art to me. I’d rather not have to understand it but I know how important it is. Especially now. We’re at this amazing period in human history where everyone has a voice. Never before has the ability to have your ideas reach millions of people been so democratized. The problem now, of course, is how to be heard over the chatter. And anyone looking to do that also has to ask themselves whether or not they deserve to be heard.
(more…)
TED just posted a fascinating clip from 2002 where Mae Jemison talks about the relationship between the arts and sciences. As someone who is at heart an artist, but who chose to study science in university, I’ve always been painfully aware of the communication barriers between the two worlds. To the artist, science is often too cold and calculating to be any fun. To the scientist, art can be subjective to the point of being irrelevant. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made a case for seeing art and science as complimentary ways of approaching life over thirty years ago, but I think Jemison states their relationship even more eloquently in this video, saying: “Science provides an understanding of a universal experience and art provides a universal understanding of a personal experience.” Now the only problem is convincing universities and high schools to teach this way…
When I started watching this, I almost wrote it off as some web 2.0 remix version of the infamous “after school special” of days gone by. It seemed – how can I put this? – very straight edge. [ For those who are unfamiliar with the term "straight edge", you can click the link for the wikipedia article or you can just be satisfied with my admittedly biased labeling of this group as journeyman fundamentalists. ] Even after it has gotten over the sizable chunk of time dedicated to admonishing you for ever taking an intoxicant, it goes on to suggest that anyone with a new laptop is probably using it to hide his or her inferior creativity. But just as I started to think that the creator had simply taken everything he had not experienced or did not own and turned it into crosses that the geniuses of the world must bear, the moralizing that had been bothering me got turned down a bit, and I was able to enjoy a Desiderata-like message to the creative class. This side of the video is, I think, captured best when it warns the struggling creative to “avoid the water cooler gang”.
