Why make art?

[Gaagaagiins]

@MDS-02

Ed: I also know the “whip cracking” part of my mind will be rewarded if/when this post gets a reply or like.

[Gaagaagiins]

K, but, just to be clear, I Liked the post before I read your edit, and I liked all of it, but especially liked:

@MDS-02

do it because you can’t predict how it will impact yourself

[deepspacefine]

@MDS-02 I had also decided to like the post before I read down to the edit.

Your words reminded me of one of my favorite books, which climaxes with this revelation: “There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do and the human condition, the human tragedy, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions so obscure that we do not, can not understand them.”

[MDS-02]

@deepspacefine that’s a nice quote. Thanks for sharing it.

[stardusty]

@prophet_goddess Just thought I’d let you know the Porter Robinson song you recommended has been in my current rotation. I like it a lot. I’m not sure I can stomach an entire album in that style right now, but I’m working up to it haha. It’s like… uncomfortably uplifting. lol.

@MDS-02

I never could hear things along “do it for yourself” lines, but something like “do it because you can’t predict how it will impact yourself” sounds more palatable to me.

Nice. “Do it for yourself” never did it for me either. If I wanted to do stuff for myself I’d fuck off entirely and lay around playing games 24/7.

To answer my own question I found a passage I really like in a book I’ve been reading. It’s called “Shoot The Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression” by Sally Brampton. Halfway through the book I found out she killed herself about 7 years after writing it. So…. that sort of colors things differently. But I’m still very grateful for the book. Here’s the quote:

“It took me a long time, for example, to understand, or to re-understand, why people do things. Why, in fact, they do anything at all. What is it that occupies their time? What is the point of doing?
Finally, I accepted that essentially there is no point - the doing is the point, that and that life is made up of a series of actions that, repeated often enough, begin to assume a shape and a meaning all of their own. They become meaningful to us only because we attach meaning to them or because they give us an outcome that serves us in some way.
I understood that life was a process and either you took part in it or you opted out. So I took part in the process, and in the taking part, I began to find meaning.”

This is more or less the conclusion I come to again and again.

[Mnemogenic]

I hope I‘m not sidestepping the topic too much, but: I don’t really worry about the “why?” of making art, personally. I suppose I don‘t take art very seriously. Sometimes there are things in my head that need to be art, so I try to make them by combining my idea with the material reality around me, and there’s some art.

I think every single human being should make art, and lots of it. We are the art-making animal; we have a responsibility. After we're all gone, there will be nobody left to play the accordion or sing in the shower.

And on a personal note, I'll also say that my relationship with art, making stuff, (and everything, really) got a lot better after I was diagnosed and received treatment for bipolar disorder. That wasn't a problem I could think myself into solving.

[antillese]

@MDS-02

“do it because you can’t predict how it will impact yourself”

Once I participated in some art jams here because I thought it would be fun and a way to learn a new music tool and it made me realize I am an amateur composer.

[hellojed]

I have been struggling with this very question recently. I am around your same age and recently completed a pretty big project, an indie game I spent 7 years working on in my spare time. When it got less than 300 downloads and very few of my friends reacted to it (especially since I had been talking about it for…years) I kind of went and declared that I quit from games. I also quit working on my webcomic at the same time after working on it for about 10 years for the same reasons, my friends just weren’t interested in it and nobody was paying attention, and it was just tedious to try and keep going with it. It felt really crushing to put all this effort into stuff and then have people go “Oh I keep meaning to play that”

I still draw a lot and I miss working on projects, so maybe i’ll get back into it someday. I have been asking “what would I make if I never showed it to anyone?” and that’s been driving a lot of motivation for me to start making comics again. As for games I think that’s going to take a lot longer to get back into, if I do at all, because I find the time and energy investment to be way too high for me and whatever payoff I’m going to get from it isn’t worth it. What kind of game would I make if nobody played it? I think I kind of already made that game…

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.

Man that AI shit is bogus. They can’t compose a shot worth a damn, can’t even hardly draw hands without thousands of correct keywords. The AI stuff also feeds off it’s own output, so eventually it’s gonna run out of human made stuff and just pump out slurry.

[stardusty]

@hellojed Your game looks cool as heck. I’m gonna give it a shot. Do you have some kind of devlog or blog about it?

Yeah in my experience friends just don’t really give a shit. But it’s not really malicious or anything. It’s just the world we live in. Everyone has hyper specific interests and there’s so much content being pushed at us from every direction. And I’m just doing my thing on the sideline. I feel like my friends regularly forget that I draw. And that’s like… my whole thing.

But for me friend art is my favorite art. It’s meaningful to me.

[hellojed]

@stardusty yeah I wrote one up here https://hellojed.itch.io/crystal-slaves/devlog/541439/crystal-slaves-the-post-mort-em

[stardusty]

@hellojed I read the entire post mortem and tried the game. I spent about an hour playing it. I might pick it up again. I can not imagine working on something consistently for seven years. That is incredible. I find your whole ordeal very admirable and inspiring, so thank you for writing about it, and releasing the game. I like your character designs a lot and I’d love to see your webcomic.

[wickedcestus]

@hellojed

My goals for my next project are to not take 7 fucking years lmao.

It is crazy how these things can just go on for years and years before you know it. I recently published a novel that I wrote and re-wrote for four years, and now that I think about it, the book I’m currently working on has been in the process of writing for over a year and a half and I still think of it as my “new” project. I really related to getting to a point where you just want to release it without making a fuss just to get it over with, and then still feeling a little disappointed when it doesn’t make the impact you wish it had. At the same time, the book resonated with a few readers, and in the end, I’m able to think of it as a success.

But yeah, I went through that whole same thing about not trying to find a publisher, not wanting to do marketing, and just wanting it in the world. And I also had that same experience of looking at people who are investing a lot more of their time and resources into all that salesmanship stuff and having it go nowhere at all, and thinking that at least I’m not betting my whole life on making this stuff work.

It’s a harrowing experience but it also shows that you have a true passion for what you do. I confidently declared many times that I was giving up on my book completely and throwing it in the bin, and then there I would be the next day with a new idea for a scene or a character. So I guess this speaks to one answer for why we make art, which is just that we are compelled by some incomprehensible part of ourselves that won’t go away.

[Gaagaagiins]

@wickedcestus

the book resonated with a few readers

Literally me

[captain]

Four years ago(!!!) I started thinking about a story, writing down sketches of scenes or characters‘ thoughts or whatever every now and again. Then COVID happened and suddenly I didn’t have a job or a social life, and I wrote this thing every day for two months. It became a reasonably long document (~ 100 pages) of story notes, dialogue, scene descriptions, etc., sort of a screenplay-like thing. Then I stopped, having burned out, and aside from a few exceptions have really not touched it in the years since. I‘ve accumulated many more notes, quotations, scene ideas, characters, character traits, but haven’t put in any real work on it in a long time. I want to go back to it. I don‘t think I’ll ever want to write for money, but I feel compelled—if that‘s the right word—by some inner need to express a whole bunch of thoughts through this abstract narrative apparatus. I don’t know to whom, or how much longer it will take, but I am committed to making it happen.

In response to the thread question: hmm... I'll have to get back to that

[hellojed]

@stardusty

I’d love to see your webcomic.

thank you! It’s here www.puppyspacepirates.com ignore the “i quit” and php error message and read from the start, it’s about 100+ pages or so.

I think with comics unless you work on them full time it’s really hard to make regular and meaningful progress, because you aren’t regularly in the zone of drawing and finishing pages. It took a really long time for me to get to 100 pages doing like one page a week, max. And then having going on hiatus several times. I really didn’t have a creative throughline for things I just wanted something to draw and sequence action with and maybe that was enough for a while? It’s harder for me to plan longer storylines because I am always changing the dialog, to the point where I would write the dialog after I had drawn everything. But it just became too time consuming and I got tired of drawing the same characters over and over again, I wonder if artists of long standing comic strips ever felt the same way

[treefroggy]

Livin' Is an Art