does anything have to matter?
Anxiety is super pointless. And unfounded… even when it feels real. I know I am not alone when I say I am susceptible to anxiety, but I might lose some people when I say I am here to invalidate my anxious feelings. Because that shit is useless.
For the past year or so I have been struggling creatively. There has been a massive void of inspiration and creative energy in my life, and this has caused me to become super anxious about art and creation. These feelings of anxiety have pushed me towards non-action, and I am not proud of that.
I find myself afraid of trial and error, a process that is extremely useful for artistic growth and exploration. Expecting to create works of art you're proud of without a phase of trial and error is pretty foolish. Yet here I am, fully expecting to create without any exploratory processes to back the work up. And it is not working in my favor, it is simply making me anxious and artistically stuck.
So why can't I just get over it? At the end of the day, I, like most in this world, want what I do to matter. I want my work to mean something. Wanting to mean something, wanting to hold worth in some way, is a part of human nature. Humans assign worth in arbitrary, often baseless ways; doing so helps us organize and categorize the world around us, which is very necessary to navigate life. But what is worth, what makes something matter? Is something’s worth based on its ability to provide something, to make a difference somehow? I do believe that is part of it, and part of why I am afraid of trial and error. I want my work to matter, I want my art to be worth something, this is what I strive for. So, failure makes me uncomfortable and anxious, even the mere thought of it- I can't fathom creating art that doesn't matter. And that mindset is what’s so useless.
Not allowing myself to create for the sake of creation is stunting me artistically, and skewing my view of what makes art worthwhile. Painting simply to paint, to create artistic material, is equally as valid as painting with the intention to change the world with your art. There is beauty, worth, and value in anything if it is assigned there. This imagined need to make a difference and create groundbreaking work takes away from one of the most simple aspects of the artistic process- enjoyment. How is one supposed to be an enthusiastic and ardent creative with this constant pressure to be revolutionary? What happened to having fun with your passion…
Social media, as we all know, is a poison in today’s world. Above all, it makes life a competition. Speaking about Instagram specifically, it has become mandatory to cultivate picture-perfect moments for the sole purpose of posting. Few people have a casual relationship with Instagram now, especially up-and-coming artists. Engagement on posts is becoming more and more important, and thus the need to create art that garners this engagement rises. With this need for postable art, new notions of worth and value pop up. There is no doubting the importance of the viewer when creating art, but with this need to cater to an Instagram audience, I feel like a lot of art is losing its personal touch. The creative desires of the artist themself should take precedence over the desires of people doom-scrolling on Instagram. But, this is much easier to say than to live by; engagement equals exposure which equals money made; creating an Instagram that garners lots of engagement is incredibly smart in the long term, but is it starting to kill the individuality that exists within artistic expression? Social media is sucking the life out of the creative process, instead of tuning the world out and throwing yourself into a piece, you have to create process videos, you have to create engaging captions, use the right hashtags, buy ad space, etc. It is not simple, and it is not super fun.
Things don't need to be so calculated, there is beauty and value in the casual…
