Some people make art for fashion. They mistakenly believe that there is a sort of hipster caché to being an artist, some form of romance to smoking Gauloises and drinking absinthe and soft self-mutilation. This belief is false.
In contemporary urban society, it is much more romantic to work in high finance, or better yet, middle management, to dress casually on Fridays and start a family and exercise at least three days a week at the company gym. Inspiration is not required to be at the office on time, to thumb digits into a personal mobile device, to touch base and circle back and follow up and drill down.
Some people think there is money in art. They incorrectly conceive that applying the above-mentioned office mentality to artmaking practices will yield capital as do sweatshops and sausage factories. This is false, too.
Any kind of creative pursuit is governed by a different rhythm — long fallow periods followed by intense bursts of activity, often fruitless. Productivity is the wrong quest for artists because art is not a product. Works of art fall more closely under the loose classification of goods and services. Their purpose is immaterial and intangible. Art accomplishes nothing productive.
Art is necessarily marginal. It is either worthless or priceless. Thus, the marketplace is less for art than it is for ideas. You don’t buy a painting or a sculpture or a pair of stilettos with antique forks driven into the heels. You buy the concept behind the work.
Some people think that art is not real work. They erroneously suppose that because children and trained monkeys and artificial intelligence are capable of making it, art must be distinct from labour. This is especially false.
Art is unavoidably work. It takes effort and time and something approaching skill. But the skill that art requires is not the skill acquired through discipline and practice. Doing more does not mean doing better. Experience doesn’t equate expertise. Art is either perfect, or it is not art.
Some people think that any undertaking can be considered art, that war or deal-making — or high finance, or better yet, middle management — can be artistic. This is also false.
There are only seven artforms: music, sculpture, painting, performing, writing, architecture, and film.
Subtle variations exist within each category. For example, fiction and history are both written arts; photography falls under film; and film no longer necessarily means celluloid. Making money is not an artform, unless we are talking about forgery. A stack of money is not a sculpture. However, setting a stack of money ablaze is performance and therefore art. Burning a stack of money might indeed be the highest art.
And writing might be the lowest. Not to denigrate my own kind. But unlike playing a musical instrument, or making a film, almost everyone can write. Doing writing artfully is the trick.
Like any of the other artforms, writing adheres to conventions of form and content and style and tradition.
Writing is musical, employing a certain melody and metre. Writing is sculptural, moulding words into shapes and scales. Writing is painterly, individual letters like brushstrokes invoking the picturesque, the page’s edge like a frame that encloses a whole scene. Writing is a performance as naked as dancing on a stripper’s pole. Writing is architectural, constructing and restructuring and enclosing and adorning space. And writing is cinematic, capturing thoughts and measuring them out in sequence and time.
Above all, writing is a calling, an unignorable inner voice that compels the writer to transcribe, acting most of the time more as a stenographer than as an author.
Like any worker, writers should be paid. Although writing is perhaps the most difficult mode of artmaking at which to earn a living, and among the most difficult to convince others of its artistic merit and monetary value. Wealth cannot be the end goal of any artist. But there are rich painters and actors and sculptors and musicians and architects and filmmakers. Still, Obama probably makes more for a book deal than Margaret Atwood.
The first time I was paid to write was in high school, when an exchange student, an uncharacteristically tall Japanese girl of astonishing beauty named Hiroko, hired me to complete her final essay for a course called “Career and Life Management.” I do not remember the subject upon which I wrote, but I do recall that Hiroko received an A on her paper and garnered the dubious praise of the teacher who could not quite square how a student with the most rudimentary grasp of the English language might have pulled off such a polished piece of penmanship.
I did at least ostensibly attempt to simplify Hiroko’s vocabulary and make it Japanese sounding, stopping short of exchanging Rs for Ls and Ls for Rs, but trying nonetheless to write as I imagined she might, using only the most basic diction and the simplest of sentence structure.
Hiroko paid me $100 for the task, and I spent my earnings on a Texas mickey of Canadian Club whisky which was consumed in the ravine at an after-school “rager” as we called them in those days. Obviously I was a natural-born writer, with both duplicity and alcoholism occurring to me simultaneously and remarkably without significant effort.
The real reason that artists make art is not to make money, nor to avoid work, nor for popularity or fashion. We do it compulsively, because we must, because it keeps us from plunging a knife into our own throats, or yours. We make art to observe and understand and most of all to be understood. A writer without a reader is like Father McKenzie eulogizing Eleanor Rigby. There is admittedly a vanity to pursuing the artistic struggle.
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay entitled Why I Write, “and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”
Mysteries are not meant to be solved. Otherwise, they cease to be truly mysterious.◼︎
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