Art as transaction

I should be slow to call myself and respect the voice of this person (and I do). At the same time, I find such things somewhat suspect. There’s no question that writing requires something of me. There is a great deal of effort required to go back to an artistic work and edit it that I’m still learning to do well. And it is sometimes maddening that good ideas come so often when in the shower, in bed or somewhere far from the nearest keyboard…

But I do feel a great deal of joy in the creation of a piece. There’s something amazing about sensing the amazing moment of a new idea and seeing that idea flow through you and on to paper. But does it take something that leaves me lacking? That’s what I question.

Loving may do that. When I give love in hard times, I may be left with scars of sacrifice. And so we may when we create something in an act of love… but with art….

Well, for me with writing it becomes a realization that I’m in an amazing narrative stream of life from which I pick up stones and pebbles to make something of beauty. Hopefully someone downstream will benefit from what I’ve made and it’s sure that the skill I have in building and learning will never be lost. It will simply be consumed in the growing skill and passion till I have the ability to do even more - all with the guidance of God’s Spirit I hope.

If this is the life I live then do I ever really own my art? Do I ever really give up something that is forever lost if everything I am belongs to others? Or in dying to self are we able to transcend this process of self-destruction and arise out of a fire not of our own making to forever love and be loved?

“The equation must balance. …the artist is diminished. Some part of himself or herself, some piece of who he or she is, has been emptied or poured out or transfered into the art. Permanently.”

This is the classic “fixed pie” version of things. (Usually used to describe economies: if someone’s getting richer then someone else must be getting equally poorer.) I disagree with this view. While creation of art does consume resources, be they emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or physical, those resources are renewable. Especially if you’re plugged in to the ultimate energy source.

Can living l ife be itself an art-form? Can a life be a work of art?

I don’t consider myself an artist in any formal way, but this seems to have application not just for artists, but for everyone.

-Mel

This thread reminds me of the Sixpence song, The Lines of my Earth. As best as I can tell, it’s about an artist who started writing songs for God and the love of songwriting, and the crisis of motivation they face on the edge of “making it big.” Here’s a little bit of it:

The lines of my earth, so brittle, unfertile, and ready to die.
I need a drink, but the well has run dry.
And we in the habit of saying the same things all over again,
For the money we shall make.

This is the last song that I write
‘Til you tell me otherwise.
And it’s because I just don’t feel it.
This is the last song ’til you tell me otherwise.
And it’s because I just don’t feel it anymore.

Good ole comment spam!

I agree that something from the artist goes into the art, in real art. Fake art, the commercial things that Thomas Kinkade does, have no soul. Music done by machinery and rote has no soul, nothing of the participant in it. I’ve even read of “artists” who believe that the art should be completely neutral, having nothing of their touch.

I strongly disagree that the act of making art diminishes the artists. I find that each piece I do, while exhausting, still suggests ideas for many more. It also improves my skills for the next one, however incrementally. Sometimes the learning is good, sometimes it’s learning what doesn’t work. Whatever I pour into the work isn’t gone forever.

The only “fake” art is art made by duplication. Just because someone doesn’t like certain art, or agree with it’s reasons for production, it doesn’t make it fake.

i feel like i get what you’re saying, personally. for some time now, i’ve believed that as our life is slowly drained (as it most certainly is from one day to the next, as we march towards our End), some things simply get lost. that doesn’t mean they aren’t replaced by other things, but i’m totally with you; art for me, too, is a transaction. i spend, and a piece of me goes into what i create. i think other things, new things, sometimes better things, sometimes worse things, take up residence in the place that piece left, but something is spent, for sure.