How It Used to Be Done

The Dedication – The Blood, Sweat and Tears

As an artist 20 years ago, you were a very special breed. Someone with a lot of dedication to their craft, someone with a lot of passion for their craft. If you wanted to make it anywhere as an artist there were a lot of hoops to jump through.

First, you needed to invest years into your craft. You had to dedicate yourself to it and practice every spare moment you had. You had to create prolifically, pushing boundaries, learning new techniques, familiarizing yourself with the rules before breaking them. Depending on your skill and your craft, you may have been in this stage for decades before ever considering unleashing your work on the public.

The Editorial Aspect – The Filter

Before you received public exposure you had a lot of pavement-pounding work ahead of you. You had to find a publisher who was willing to put your work out to the masses. As a songwriter you had to find a publisher, as a writer a publishing house, as a painter a gallery who would be willing to display your work. All along the way you faced rejection, anger, fear, and a lot of other personal emotions for the input that you received about your work. “The painting is too abstract”, “Your plot has been done before”, “Guitar music is on the way out“.

From this point you either press on with what you have, maybe you perfect it or maybe you change it altogether to fit the mold that someone is looking for. You now re-group, re-package, re-affirm that you are not the un-original wannabe that they all tell you that you are. This takes a lot of dedication and a lot of perseverance. It also takes very thick skin and a love for the craft that overpowers the pain of the rejections you will most likely receive.

Finally, after months or years or decades of hard work and perspiration someone decides to publish your article in their magazine, market your album or display your sculpture. But there’s a catch; the album has too many songs, the chapters in the book are too short. You now need to edit. Someone else is taking your creative child and asking you to slaughter it! So now you decide to work with the editorial figure-head to make your work more “marketable” or “mass-digestable”.

The Recognition

Your creation is now ready for glory and fame and the recognition that it deserves, that you’ve worked so hard for. At this point the public and your artistic peers have the say and either they accept your work and offer you the accolades that you have always dreamed of, or they dismiss it or ignore it.

How It Works Now

Instant, Self-Publishing

I can now create whatever I want and expose it to the masses. With the advent of the Internet The Filter is circumvented.

I can write and record a song and post it to thesixtyone.com — a really cool new music site, by the way — and get exposure for myself or for my band. It doesn’t have to be good, I don’t even have to have a really good grasp of what it is I’m doing.

I call it art and I tell others it’s art, and I put it out there.

Is It Art?

Should we call it art though? This is one of those philosophical questions that people have asked for ages; “Who decides what is art?

I watched Marlon Brando, someone I respect and admire very much as a talented artist, tell a reporter in an interview I found on YouTube that he was not a great artist. He almost seemed insulted that the interviewer would even suggest that he was an artist.

Recently Kenny Chesney received an award for Entertainer of the Year by the Academy of Country Music. The award caused a lot of controversy when he expressed his disdain that the award was chosen by the public rather than the members of the academy.

“So… Who Does Decide What Is Art?”

Creations should only be called art after an immense amount of practice, determination — and most importantly — acceptance by other artists. The honor of having your work called art should be bestowed upon you by other artists, not the public in general and definitely not by yourself. If you are truly an artist, other artists will recognize it.

I can’t call myself an artist and the general public can’t accurately call me an artist either. If I have even a limited amount of skill in my craft, I probably have much more skill than 90% of the general public. Of course they are going to call me an artist.

When other artists recognize you — people who are also highly skilled — it’s fair to say that you are a skilled artist and your work can be considered art.

The Pros and Cons of “Art” on The Internet

Pros

1. The Internet is a great way to get exposure. Using social networking an aspiring artist can gain a lot of exposure for their craft using the Internet. You can receive a lot of feedback, both positive and negative, from people throughout the world.
2. Easier access. It is easier and faster to get the exposure and feedback online. It is also easier for fans or potential fans to access your work.
3. No editorial review. No one can tell you what you can and cannot do, can’t tell you that you are breaking established rules or limit what you do creatively.

Cons

1. There’s a lot of garbage. With everyone jockeying to promote their creations, there is an awful lot of garbage that you have to sift through before finding something good.
2. The good stuff is easily missed. Within all of that garbage, it is easy for the good stuff to be lost in the confusion.
3. No editorial review. Also listed as a pro, the lack of the editorial filter makes it easy for the garbage to become mixed within the good stuff.
4. Monetary potential can be limited. Although there are many ways to make money online, a lot of them are not directly linked to your craft, people are not necessarily paying for your craft. Advertising is not really the same as being paid for your creation and it isn’t as satisfying as someone deciding to to purchase a canvas you painted so they can display it in their living room.

The Internet is An Anarchic Sandbox

The Internet has no order, no governing bodies for content and no filters but it is a great place to play. The Internet is a great place to practice, get feedback, network, and get some exposure but it isn’t the place to become recognized as an artist. If you are serious about your craft you should probably pursue the traditional avenues to get yourself published, recognized, credited and paid.

There are many bloggers who have gone on to write books and bands or singers who have gone from MySpace to a record deal but it does not work the other way around. Published writers are not tripping over each other to get on a blog and signed recording artists are not trampling each other to get a MySpace page.

I definitely believe the Internet dilutes true works of art by mixing them with all of the garbage that is passed as art on the Internet.

Is the Internet diluting true art? Is there too much being passed as art on the Internet? Share your thoughts in the comments.

This night I wasn’t writing, I was leaning back in my chair and gazing blankly into the flames that danced in the stone fireplace on the other side of my desk. The books in the shelves to either side of the fireplace, stacked all the way to the ceiling, could not provide to me in their millions of words anything close to answer the question I was asking.

I leaned forward and placed my elbows on the desk and my head in my ink-stained hands. I was beginning to lose hope that an answer was to be had at all. I thought maybe it was a question I ought never to have asked in the first place, for the thought of constantly asking and constantly receiving no definitive answer was driving me to despair. It was a despair that had me wishing that my life would end and my soul, finally free from the bondage of my fleshy prison, would finally be liberated to know the answers to all questions that had ever been or could ever be asked.

I waited there for a few minutes wishing my soul could be free before lifting my face from my hands and muttering to myself.

“What a foolish thought.”

Of course I couldn’t be sure of the purpose for my existence, but the mere fact that I still did indeed exist was enough evidence to show me that there was a purpose.

But I didn’t learn my purpose that night. How many nights had I sat there pondering thoughts that were above my capacity to understand? I couldn’t even begin to guess at the number, but I had sat there very many nights. Each was the same; asking the purpose, wishing it didn’t matter and then resigning to the notion that it couldn’t be known. Uncertainty is not something that should be experienced alone.

I sat there every day of the week accompanied only by the soft flickering light that the fire and a small candle on my desk afforded. If there had been a good woman waiting for me to leave the confines of my study I may have been a different sort of man. My desk and pen and paper may have grown dusty and my ink may have grown dry and useless as I entertained her and assured her that she meant everything to me, that nothing else in the world mattered or existed.

Finally I decided I had enough thinking and grabbed my jacket from the nearby bench as I made my way to the door. At that moment I had a desire to experience people and decided to get out of my house and into society. Whether or not I interacted with another person mattered little to me. I just needed to see that there were others out there, some having their lives on-course, some off-track and others with no idea as to the location of their lives and their souls in them.

I opened the door as I looked over my shoulder to survey the room before I left.

“What a mess. I should really clean this up when I return.”

The door was fully open when I turned around, my hand still on the knob as I stepped over the door sill.

She caught me off guard, standing there before my door in the fine blowing snow.

Her mouth opened and she began to speak to me.

When I returned, there it was, looking no different that it had before, although it now seems so much more attractive and exciting.

The world seems somehow fresh now, waiting to be explored and documented. Whether it’s by fountain pen and Moleskine or computer and Internet access, it cries out, waiting for someone to make it concrete.

I am still waiting on some inspiration for my first mass-marketed literary achievement. I’m sure that somewhere down the line the first will seem very trivial and I’ll have a good laugh at it. But right now it seems like the first rough stepping-stone towards highways paved with marble.

Now I’m excited. O words, how you do get me going.

I was reading a blog I came across (linked to from a Twitter friend’s blog) and it is titled, “StreetRag – An Urban Notebook”. It seems really quite pointless in the best sense of the word, but the author Michael Gravel chronicles his journeys through Edmonton. It isn’t a journal or a diary though, it looks like it’s practice. He takes what he experiences and then describes them to death. His writing is introspective and thoughtful.

I really enjoyed reading his March 8th post, “The Guy With Slippery Eyes“. It reads like a short story almost and it just really made me remember that I love writing, I love reading, and that both have played a very important part in my life. I foolishly thought that their part was already played and that it was no longer a necessity.

When I was younger I wrote poems all the time, short stories when an idea stuck in my head and the words flowed through me. Through my writings I learned a lot about myself. Once you get in that state of “flow” while writing the words just form themselves and you find yourself just an instrument for the words to use to get themselves out. There were many times I would lay back on our sectional hand-me-down couch in the living room and just write. Later I would wake up from my writing state and go over the words that had found their way through me to the page. Many times they surprised me, I didn’t know I had though a certain way about a certain situation until I had read what I wrote.

So thanks to Michael’s site, I re-discovered my love for the written word. I went out immediately and bought two books, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones and The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. Mister Pip attracted me because it is about a girl on an island that learns to love reading and writing and the worlds that can be created through it. I devoured that book as soon as I got home (I’ve always read very fast). The next day I read the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia.

I loved them both. I’ve found my love. I don’t want to neglect it again.