Why make art?

creative
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I apologize if this is stupid or depressing. And the answer is probably glaringly obvious to some. But I really struggle with this question. I'm 37 years old and it never gets easier. I never found a real answer.

My brain is awash in ideas for all sorts of projects. Unique projects, I feel, with a unique point of view. But it is very difficult for me to pin down one and simply get to work. Every resource is available to me and I even have the time.

I've completed projects in the past, but have had to almost trick myself into believing they were important. Or it was the early days of the internet, and anything made and presented to the world at that time just seemed special and significant. Everything was crackling with excitement.

Or I often made things for other people. I love making things when someone asks. Or making something for someone who I know would appreciate it. But I guess I don't really have that in my life right now. Or at least it's not obvious.

The only reasons I can currently come up with to make art are that I'm good at it and I can do it. But for my existential, depression prone brain these reasons aren't good enough. Artists are a dime a dozen. And many have enough confidence and self esteem to propel them. I don't so why bother? Wow I sound really pathetic. Yikes. In a lot of aspects in my life I've always felt like I'm missing some fundamental component of myself that makes me believe what I do is important and worth doing. Everyone else just seems to do stuff and enjoy it and get on fine.

This is all not to even mention growing AI technology. It gets exponentially better and I imagine soon people will be able to simply describe exactly what drawing, movie, book, video game or experience they want and easily receive it, not unlike a Star Trek holodeck. Every time I encounter some startlingly decent ai art in the wild I have a mini existential crisis.

Sometimes the simplest words can knock some sense of meaning into me, but at the moment I'm struggling to find it. Thanks for letting me vent at least!

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i‘m having a hard time writing something that doesn’t sound pretentious–i think about the questions you raised quite a bit, though i‘m not sure i’m prepared to write about it at length.

art should be created for itself. any success or recognition that stems from that is tertiary at best. to create is a gift and a necessary part of any life worth living.

whenever i see people (not you, OP) praise ai art that is "good," i have to believe they would also eat their own shit if it tasted like chocolate.

i'm lucky enough where i don't earn my living from my art, and i realize these questions are thornier for those who do.

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if you asked a child why they made art they would probably tell you, “it is fun” or “i like it” or “it's pretty”

children make art without anyone having to sit down and explain to them what is art. it's natural. humans have always made art. it does not matter if times are hard. humans make art. art is human.

i am in a bit of an art block myself. i used to make art to express a part of me that i thought i was supposed to hide. i put my pain and frustration on the page so that it didn't come out elsewhere.
now in a much better place i have sort of been avoiding art.

but when i have sat down to do it , i tell you what, i enjoy it. it is fun. it's a little puzzle. how do i best express this idea or feeling. how do i use the fundamentals of this medium to say something. how do i share my inner world with my outer one.

one thing you mentioned about your unique perspective. art is a lot of trying to dig deep into that perspective. you see the world different than everyone else. what do you see? how can you express that?

I guess what I am saying is you need to get in touch with that inner child that all they needed were crayons and a piece of paper. easier said than done. but i guess i believe the pursuit of artistic expression is a way to get to know that inner self

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To have a bit of a laugh, while we're here and we got the time

(I'm being succinct to the point of being flippant, but, not because this is insincere, or that I think the question can be dismissed so easily... it's just the way I can think of right now to express how I feel in a way that takes any pretensions on the subject and blasts them into bits)

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Just before I opened the forums (as I do many times throughout the day) I was thinking about a truly stupid and self indulgent and kind-of-pointless-but-that'd-be-the-point project that came to me a few months ago. Is this a sign I should start it?

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Even doing a small, small bit of it and putting it up here would make me happy and make a handful of you laugh, and then even assuming I had the wherewithal to actually complete it (because it‘d be a FUCKTON of work) it’d be toiling away in obscurity on something only a very, veeeery small number of people would ever actually interact with. But, again, that'd kind of be the point, and it would be obvious to anyone who witnessed it that that was kind of the point.

The point would be because it's a thing that seems funny and then seems insane if it is actually completed. Kind of like that comedian who vowed to eat an entire physical copy of _Infinite Jest._

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this is just my anecdotal advice and personal opinion from my perspective and life journey:

after years of trying to take that stuff to the next level, I stopped making art for self promotion, internet posts, any sort of “job”. I got jobs doing manual labor. then after a couple years, I‘d

a. doodle randomly, for myself again.

b. need to draw things for pragmatic reasons, like logos or labels

Then that evolved into being able to embellish my own life with little art pieces again. Though it’s still mostly limited to labels and pragmatic stuff.

Not everyone is meant to be an artist. Some of us are ideas guys who have the best ideas but aren‘t meant to be the ones to do them.

Nowadays with twitter and the internet, there’s such a weird culture of self-promotion surrounding artists, and it ties into the mental illness of posting for attention. I think this combined with people who are chronically online having no practical skills, or life outside of the computer, has lead to a lot of people driving themselves crazy with the choice to be “artists”, while constraining themselves big time to sites like twitter.

So yeah, I basically stopped forcing myself to do art, and it was one of the greatest choices of my life!

Just live your life! stop doing art when it's tormenting you. You're not van Gogh! touch grass!
**Let life be your art!!** that's what I do! my lifestyle is my art! I live my life artfully.

Now I am still a creator, but I enjoy it. I'm a builder. I build housing. I build solar arrays. I build electronics, shape the earth, sew seeds, create life. Why do it on paper when you can do it in a way that improves our world directly? Plus, when I want to, it can feel good to add a little fella onto something I've built.

If you're not finding it to be meaningful, then you should do something that does feel meaningful. like building a windmill for your village or starting a community garden.

so just stop! I'm gonna be that guy! just stop doing art! it's overrated! Let someone else do it! You don't need to make art to be special or valid!

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I‘m sure it’s different for everyone but to me I can only go so long without starting to feel restless if I'm not making some kind an item (music / image / etc), so keeping that feeling at bay is my main motivation.

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@“Andy B”#p124633 This is all not to even mention growing AI technology. It gets exponentially better and I imagine soon people will be able to simply describe exactly what drawing, movie, book, video game or experience they want and easily receive it, not unlike a Star Trek holodeck.

My friend, you should remind yourself that the only reason AI can be "good" is because it has good human art as input. Veritable mountains of it, in fact.

AI art is never "good" in of itself, AI generation algorithms are just a dumb script that gutless cowards taught how to commit art theft in the form of what's basically Richard Pryor's high frequency transaction scheme from _Superman III_ (1983)

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@“Andy B”#p124633 Or I often made things for other people. I love making things when someone asks. Or making something for someone who I know would appreciate it. But I guess I don’t really have that in my life right now. Or at least it’s not obvious.

You also sound like you need to make something self-indulgent, maybe something even goofy or totally completely experimental, or just something that makes you cackle to yourself late at night as you work on it. I say, if you have a lot of projects in mind that feel unique and come from a unique point of view, but you have decision paralysis on what to do... here's my advice. Choose the weirdest one and think of 1 more thing to make it even more weird, and just give 'er. Do something maybe even completely unrecognizable as your work, at least initially. Start from weird foundations.

Make something that if no one on Earth saw after you were done, you wouldn't even care, because you'd still recall having a grand old time making it. An act of pure creation for its own sake. Don't think so hard about the meaning of it! If you make a living elsewhere, don't worry about it _"meaning"_ anything. Or, if you have the sort of compulsion that makes you feel unable to do things unless they're productive, consider this to be critical self enrichment time.

I really reject the idea that creation always has to be borne out of blood sweat and tears. That was partly why I got out of the western art music composition game (I was in a doctorate program even!), all it was was blood sweat and tears and my existence was otherwise too precarious to be able to just do shit for fun. To put it simply... approach things like a standup comedian, if you've never done this before. Is what you're doing even funny if you can't even make yourself laugh?

Of course, I say that you should do some Pure Creation and just throw it in the trash once you're done, but, I'll also just say, this place, as in, forums.insertcredit.com, is one of the _world's_ premiere places where we all love to see shit that people make just sitting within their own madness. So... you know. If you do all that, we'd probably _love_ to see it, here.

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But also serious answer. As I have aged as an artist I have been banished to obscurity. No one wants what I am making, and no one likes to see an old flop hanging around. This has been incredibly freeing. I make the work I want entirely for me. I set a goal and I reach it. No one can take that away from me. I only share my art because I'll be damned if I am going to let "not being famous" silence me.
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@“treefroggy”#p124649 If you’re not finding it to be meaningful, then you should do something that does feel meaningful. like building a windmill for your village or starting a community garden.


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so just stop! I’m gonna be that guy! just stop doing art! it’s overrated! Let someone else do it! You don’t need to make art to be special or valid!

treefroggy is one of our forums' wisest sages, so, while I'll say that maybe you could still do both, I'll also say that if you've never done it before, buy at least potted plant, and learn how to cultivate it. Ask treefroggy how to grow beans!

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if you like being creative but find art to be meaningless, I highly recommend trying and learning practical skills.

This is an awesome, relaxing, truly wholesome channel.
https://youtu.be/jy5wRgNOIkE
https://youtu.be/SojCsMV5Bvc
You can very easily combine practical skills with your art skills too. this benefits you in many ways:

  • - a new art medium can provide new inspiration
  • - welders, fabricators, can make a lot of money making art installations, because often times people have the idea and hire a welder to put it together.

    • I knew an old man whose art was welding, he did art installations, but also welded his own entire world, and welded up his own kayaks, which he used regularly. lol.

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    @“Gaagaagiins”#p124654 treefroggy is one of our forums’ wisest sages,

    [URL=https://i.imgur.com/NfeHENd.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/NfeHENd.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

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    @“treefroggy”#p124656 That pic is treefroggy researching the Chaos Emeralds

    14

    this may be a little cringe/pretentious, but whenever i think about this question i think about part II of w.h. auden's poem in memory of w.b. yeats:

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    You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

    The parish of rich women, physical decay,

    Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

    Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

    In the valley of its making where executives

    Would never want to tamper, flows on south

    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

    A way of happening, a mouth.

    (if you're more a dance music guy than a modernist poetry guy, i also find this same comfort in [the porter robinson album *nurture*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-74HTjRbuY))

    i do agree with treefroggy, you don't *have* to do anything you don't want to do. although personally i think this question probably wouldn't bother you as much if you didn't *want* to make art, and when i've been in headspaces like yours in the past the most terrifying response i've received has been "why don't you just stop?" i dunno, i do what i do because i have to. it's a *way of happening*.

    it's not that it's not hard and it's not that i don't often wonder why i do it. but it's also that i think the notion that you have to have a solid practical justification for what you do is dumb. it may or may not be helpful for you to think about it this way, but there's no solid practical justification for doing anything at all. the sun will swallow the earth in 4 billion years and nothing will survive that, not our art, not our life-saving infrastructure, not any of the nice things we do for people. don't let people lie to you that there's some way you could be spending your life that would be more worthwhile.

    also, re: AI, putting aside my technical belief that we're pretty much at the top of the sigmoid on that stuff and it's not going to get much better than it is right now, people don't consume art because of its technical competency or because it's exactly what they asked for. people want a mixture of novelty and familiarity, and image generators can only give us familiarity. it's a real "faster horses" kind of thing, people can't get what they actually want out of these generators because most of the time people don't know what they want until they see it. the most realistic outcome i can imagine for AI tools besides them just going away is them being used to generate something bad-to-mediocre that a human then has to clean up or edit, which allows employers to depress wages because they can say you're not *really* doing the work, you're just the editor.

    15

    I have struggled to communicate with people my whole life, and felt that I didn‘t understand anyone. The first time I realized that people existed who I could relate to and understand was while reading novels. I felt like the authors weren’t talking to me; they were talking to themselves, and allowing me to listen to them talk to themselves. Because of that, I felt that what they were saying was truthful. I realized that what went on inside of them was the same kind of stuff that was going on inside of me – that my thoughts are human thoughts. I write because if those people hadn't written, I would never have understood myself or other people the way I do now. And my hope is that my writing might one day help someone else in the same way.

    At the same time, I recognize that I will probably never know if that's the case. As far as I know, I am writing for no one but myself. But I'm sure that's how many of the authors I love felt, as well. That's what keeps me going. I can rationally convince myself that the likelihood of anyone being impacted by my writing is negligible. However, no matter how many times I do that, I continue to write anyway. My irrational faith in the power of self-expression always wins, in the end.

    Also, as @Gaagaagiins and other have said, it's fun. I discover a lot while I write, and I make stuff exist that had never existed before. Ideas come from nowhere, and sometimes I read my work back and it doesn't even feel like me who wrote it. I don't know how to say this without sounding like a bit of a weirdo, but I think there's something divine in that. I feel like I am somehow attuned to something. I know people don't like that kind of mysticism when applied to writing, and I understand that, but it is spiritual for me. My entire religious understanding is based on how I feel when I write from the bottom of my heart.

    In a more material sense, I can read work that I wrote years ago and feel an intense connection with my past in a way that I don't think would be possible through memory alone. I think there's something amazing in that, too. Of course, I am applying all of this to writing, because that's what I do, but I think it can equally apply to many other forms. I think many musicians feel that they can most effectively communicate with and understand others through music, and visual artists through visual art, and etc. Art allows us to express those things that can't be expressed in everyday ways. I don't know; I think that's beautiful.

    I think that many here are correct to say that, in most cases, the best way to allow your art to flourish is to totally disconnect it from the idea of money, fame, recognition, or anything like that. It sucks, because having another job means sacrificing much time that you could devote to art, but in my eyes, that's better than sacrificing your art itself to pecuniary desires and commercial whims. Lots of people disagree with me about this, or say that this is a pretentious way to think, but I can't help but feel this way for all the obvious reasons related to what I've said above.

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    Sidenote but @wickedcestus has a literature podcast and it's great

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    Why make art?

    [URL=https://i.imgur.com/xIDE932.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/xIDE932.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

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    @“MoH”#p124634 Please be pretentious! I‘m pretentious as heck. It’s at least better than being trite and banal.

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    @“MoH”#p124634 to create is a gift and a necessary part of any life worth living.

    This is very beautiful. Thank you.

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    @“treefroggy”#p124649

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    @“treefroggy”#p124649 stop doing art when it’s tormenting you.

    This. I think this is what I needed to hear.

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    @“treefroggy”#p124649 so just stop! I’m gonna be that guy! just stop doing art! it’s overrated!

    And this too. It‘s weird. Maybe almost like reverse psychology? But I just need to hear someone be plain and truthful. If it sucks or hurts to do, don’t do it. There are plenty of other things I can do. I‘m an “artist” but I don’t have that relentless itch to create like all my artist friends seem to have.

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    @“Gaagaagiins”#p124651 you need to make something self-indulgent, maybe something even goofy or totally completely experimental, or just something that makes you cackle to yourself late at night as you work on it.

    Yes. I could stand to be recklessly self indulgent. Thank you.

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    @“treefroggy”#p124656 if you like being creative but find art to be meaningless, I highly recommend trying and learning practical skills.

    I also like cooking and baking and consider that a sort of art, definitely an immediately more practical and useful one. One of my more lofty ideas is for a zero waste restaurant. But that's a commitment!

    God there are so many good insights here and it hasn't even been a day since I posted. I'll digest these and respond more soon. I expected maybe one response. This is normally the sort of thing I'd post to reddit and then get a handful of snarky or sappy responses. I'm never using reddit again. haha.

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    @“tomjonjon”#p124719 Being human is the reason to make art.

    As well, I would say this doesn't work the other way around.