artistic controversy
I don’t want to write the sort of (to overuse the word yet again) pretentious bullshit that is supposed to somehow, in some ridiculous version of reality sum up what I have been doing for the past four years or eight years or twenty-three years of my life. I don’t want to put down on paper anything under the understanding that it will be looked at and judged by some external other that has no sense of where I was really trying to go with it.
Then again, that leads me to a new direction.
Maybe it really is my job to show the direction I intended to go, and if I can’t then perhaps what I wrote is just bullshit that should be burned in a book fire, consuming all of the refuse that supposed “authors” come up with because they have bad dreams at night and then later see seeds of those dreams in reality and think, “I should write it all out, tell everyone what I think”. Like coming up with a short story about a boy who has wings and a girl who’s in love with him because one night, late into the thing, I had a thought that your shoulders might look nice if they had feathery protrusions coming from them, and perhaps you could cover me with them, and perhaps we would be nice under them, and if it were winter we could be warm without a blanket.
But it’s a terrible idea, and people like me shouldn’t write about things like that. Maybe people like me shouldn’t write anything at all.
Or, maybe we should – but maybe we shouldn’t be on stupid academic deadlines by professors who only know about assignments and reading reports and essays with well defined theses and the professors of those professors and runners of programs who only know how to think in category sheets and course requirements and syllabi that don’t account for real life or full-time jobs or weddings in places that aren’t your home.
Perhaps, being an artist doesn’t apply to academia.
If we really thought about it, we would realize that it can’t.
Academia is about people who want to study, want to read, want to think.
Art is about people who have been thinking, who have come up with all the thought-out conclusions to all the great thinkers already, who have to create something else in order to feel at rest.
Maybe our fatal error is that we’ve tried to combine them, have tried to conventionalize creativity, have tried to teach art as if art is intellectualism, as if creating something new and individual can be learned, can be put on a syllabus, can be contained in an essay or a project or an assignment that earns a grade based on how well you have fulfilled the above requirements.
Perhaps that’s why I feel stifled and stale. Then again, perhaps in all my learning – in all my educating of myself, I have only learned that I have no new ideas, that all the metaphors and similes and allusions have been used, and there is nothing new to create.
Perhaps creating from the lack of inspiration is the only place left to go.
Then again, that leads me to a new direction.
Maybe it really is my job to show the direction I intended to go, and if I can’t then perhaps what I wrote is just bullshit that should be burned in a book fire, consuming all of the refuse that supposed “authors” come up with because they have bad dreams at night and then later see seeds of those dreams in reality and think, “I should write it all out, tell everyone what I think”. Like coming up with a short story about a boy who has wings and a girl who’s in love with him because one night, late into the thing, I had a thought that your shoulders might look nice if they had feathery protrusions coming from them, and perhaps you could cover me with them, and perhaps we would be nice under them, and if it were winter we could be warm without a blanket.
But it’s a terrible idea, and people like me shouldn’t write about things like that. Maybe people like me shouldn’t write anything at all.
Or, maybe we should – but maybe we shouldn’t be on stupid academic deadlines by professors who only know about assignments and reading reports and essays with well defined theses and the professors of those professors and runners of programs who only know how to think in category sheets and course requirements and syllabi that don’t account for real life or full-time jobs or weddings in places that aren’t your home.
Perhaps, being an artist doesn’t apply to academia.
If we really thought about it, we would realize that it can’t.
Academia is about people who want to study, want to read, want to think.
Art is about people who have been thinking, who have come up with all the thought-out conclusions to all the great thinkers already, who have to create something else in order to feel at rest.
Maybe our fatal error is that we’ve tried to combine them, have tried to conventionalize creativity, have tried to teach art as if art is intellectualism, as if creating something new and individual can be learned, can be put on a syllabus, can be contained in an essay or a project or an assignment that earns a grade based on how well you have fulfilled the above requirements.
Perhaps that’s why I feel stifled and stale. Then again, perhaps in all my learning – in all my educating of myself, I have only learned that I have no new ideas, that all the metaphors and similes and allusions have been used, and there is nothing new to create.
Perhaps creating from the lack of inspiration is the only place left to go.
