There's been a set of questions plaguing me lately. About art, both the word and the picture forms. The first has become a driving point, a point of true madness for myself. Its very simple:
"Is creativity dead?"
That is to ask "is there anything new left to create?" It seems that these days there is nothing left to make. Nothing left to do. No new trails to blaze, that the creative landscape has been uprooted, plowed, and paved over. A hundred years ago, Metropolis was not yet thought up, and now it is all but reality. Robots are real, cyborgs are slowly becoming feasible. Next stop, Ghost in the Shell. So what is left? What is still new enough that no one has gone down the route and come back with word that the other side is already being assimilated.
Which leads to the next:
"Is art dead?"
This is more of a question of culture. Has the world moved beyond the art and the artist? The internet has shown that more people style themselves as "artists" than the amount of people that consider themselves a part of any major religion. Has the mass of inane copycats and deranged outcasts (who are in themselves a group, which they all belong to. It boggles.) who have nothing better to do that force their cynicism and madness upon the masses taken over art and killed it with a sock full of hot nickels?
The last, I admit is a bit more selfish.
"Am I, in part, to blame?"
I admit, I've gone through the loner phase, the goth years, the punk, the anarchist, the god-complexed megalomania. Now here I sit in a sort of quarter-life crisis. 1/4 the way through life, and I'm struggling to find who I am and what I want. Who do I want to be? The artist, the writer, the starving struggling soul trying to find life and love among the wastes? This is a question (or a variation thereon), I believe everyone asks themselves. And I believe there is no correct way for everyone to find the answer, it all comes down to the individual.
There is no handbook on becoming an adult, just there is no handbook on what constitutes art, or what makes an artist. The journey is the answer, really. There are no easily-defined pieces or anything like that. Art takes time, patience, and dedication. And in the end, I think becoming an adult worth more than their weight in horse shit takes the same.
A friend of mine made an interesting statement while I wrote this. He liked me to Terrence McKenna, the man who theorized that our primitive ancestors evolved the way they did because of psilocybin. While I admit that I don't do much research for this blog, its just me editorializing and giving my opinions, I do know and read enough to formulate my own beliefs and not feel completely ignorant.
On that note, I don't think psilocybin caused all this. Nor do I think its all an act to impress the opposite sex. If anything, it is mankind coming to term with the fact we are indeed alone, the sole intelligent, sentient, and cultured lifeform on this planet. This is also why I believe religion came about. But thats another rant for another time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
For the record, I do believe there's new stuff to create, but that it won't be all-new. It'll be mostly synthesis and refinement of something that's been done already, somewhere. Many ideas for new things come from nature. Inspiration comes from many places, and it often isn't really easy to track down where.
I guess my take - which appears similar to yours - is that it all depends on your definition of the words. And, in the end, whether or not you're happy with what you create is up to you. Just don't expect the world to beat a path to your door if you don't do something that's in the current fashion. :P (You never know, though)
"All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
It's a hard subject to have a straightforward opinion on my man. The stories, poems, songs that we grew up on are always in the back of our minds and it screams to be let out. We have to ability to be original, there can always be some new epic, a new wave of creativity, because there is no end to imagination, but the problem is we love those old books and we want, somewheres inside, to keep them going, so instead of being original... well, you get the idea. We have to server our bonds to what we know and make our own worlds. Or something like that.
Post a Comment