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How to Cultivate Creativity in Your Life
- Matthew Harris
- May 23, 2023
- 22 min read
Unlock your creative potential! Join us on a transformative journey as we delve into the art of cultivating creativity, inspired by the renowned producer Rick Rubin's insightful book, 'The Creative Act". Explore the dichotomy between art and commerce, uncover the wellspring of inspiration, and learn to forge a deep connection with yourself, empowering you to authentically engage with your audience. Discover the profound impact of social responsibility in the realm of art, and allow your unique voice to shape a more meaningful world.
Full podcast episodes available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: Tim Ferriss, Sam Harris, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Dr. Brene Brown, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Matthew Walker, Jonathan Haight, Roland Griffiths, PhD, Niall Ferguson, Chris Palmer, MD, Dr. Michio Kaku, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung Bill Gurely, Jason Calacanis, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg, Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, Todd McFarlane, Bill Burr, Terry Crews, Hugh Jackman, Matthew McConaughey James Clear, Stephen Pressfield, Seth Godin, Susan Cain, Morgan Housel, Jocko Willink, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Tamara Levitt, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, Malcolm Gladwell, David Deutsch, John Vervaeke, Richard Dawkins, David Goggins
Show Notes:
Introduction
Greetings to listeners
Discussion
Problem Solving vs Creativity, Creativity vs Commerce, Commerce vs Art
Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious
An Idea Ripens on Time
Work Hinting at Greatness Contains a Charge
How to Boost Receptivity
Analysis as a Secondary Function of Awareness
Science Catching up to Art, Art Catching up to the Spiritual
Building a Practice
Vulnerability and Connection Through Art
Patience and Inspiration
Habits and Limiting Beliefs
Authenticity and the Ecstatic
Legacy and Social Responsibility
Transcript:
Hello beautiful people. This is episode 10 of the Matt’s Mindset Podcast, the pod that helps you stand on the shoulders of giants so you can achieve your dreams.
Last week we spoke extensively about the need for self education in a world of AI, and one of the takeaways from that pod is that for now, humans will continue to dominate the realms of creativity and critical thinking.
And to that end, I wanted to discuss creativity, what it is, and how to cultivate it. Creativity is something every person is born with, and something everyone uses on a day to day basis, whether they are aware of it or not. Creativity is what separated Australopithecus from Homo Habilus. We created tools to make a task easier.
In the words of David Deutsch, you can’t live an ordinary life without coming up with new, good explanations for things. And that is where humans will continue to thrive in the coming years, even in a world of AI.
Creativity exists on a spectrum, as does most things in life. On one end of the spectrum are creative solutions to problems. Things we do everyday without even really thinking about them. At the other end of the spectrum is art, the purest expression of creativity.
I’ll be discussing art at length in this pod, leaning extensively on Rich Rubin’s book, the Creative Act, as well as my own personal experience, having written 3 novels, 15 original pilots for tv, and eight feature length screenplays.
When it comes to art, the object isn’t to make it. It’s to cultivate that wonderful state that makes art inevitable. So how can you tune in to your own creativity? How can you cultivate this state which makes art and creativity inevitable?
Creativity is connecting with what makes us human. Art is connecting with what makes us divine. When we can connect with the divine, with the ultimate intelligence, and distill it through our creativity through self expression, we create art, which, if done correctly, illustrates a truth about what it means to be you, and what it means to be human. We connect with it. We have an emotional response to the stimulus. And if powerful enough, the art will continue to live on as a cultural meme in our society. The more powerful the truth expressed, the longer the legacy of the piece of artwork.
So where does this truth come from? It doesn’t come from us. We are simply the instrument. We have individual tastes and value judgements about how we see the world. We are a perspective of God. For more about that and the ultimate intelligence, go back to my nature of God episode.
But everything is connected. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Only repurposed. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, pioneered the theory of collective consciousness.
According to Jung, the collective unconscious is a shared reservoir of human experiences, instincts, and archetypes that are inherited from our ancestral past. It is the source of universal symbols and patterns that are present in myths, religions, and cultural expressions across different times and places.
This is similar to the concept of the Akashic Records, which are believed to contain the collective experiences and knowledge of all human consciousness, past and present. It is a repository of archetypes, symbols, and patterns that are said to be accessible through spiritual practices such as meditation.
Both concepts suggest that there is a deeper layer of consciousness beyond the individual psyche, which is shared by all humans. They also imply that this collective layer of consciousness holds valuable information and insights that can help individuals to understand themselves and their place in the world.
"There’s a reason we are drawn to gazing at the ocean. It is said the ocean provides a closer reflection of who we are than any mirror." The person who makes something today isn’t the same person who returns to the work tomorrow.
That is what art is. By tuning into the collective unconsciousness you can receive insight and truth and channel it through your self expression to create a work of art. How?
As Rubin advises, the first step is to tune in:
If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it's not uncommon for the idea to find voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. In this great unfolding, ideas and thoughts, themes and songs and other works of art exist in the aether and ripen on schedule, ready to find expression in the physical world. As humans, it is our job to draw down this information, transmute it, and share it. There’s a certain time for ideas to arrive, and they find a way through us.
I’ve found this to be the case in my life.
My first novel was based on the loose premise of “what would happen if the Nazi’s won World War II?” And shortly after completing it three years later, Man in the High Castle on Amazon was rebooted from the Phillip K Dick book I didn’t even know existed. And while my iteration was vastly different from the series based on our individual self expressions, the idea was the same, and both works even included elements of alternate universes. The ideas time had come.
Same with the pilot I wrote about a mother who’s child was killed by raiders in this sci-fi space opera. She then went on to train and become the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy. A bloody war broke out and she was hired by one side to steal a child from the other side, because the child had physic powers which could turn the tables in the war. But when the bounty hunter steals the child, she finds he reminds her too much of her own son, and refuses to turn him over to the other faction to be experimented on. I remember pitching this to a friend who worked for Warner Bros, who politely waited for me to finish before asking, “Have you seen the Mandalorian?”
“No, I replied, that new Disney show that just came out?” This was years ago, the pilot had just aired.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s like the same thing. A space opera with a bounty hunter, a child with psychic powers, a bloody war that stretches across the galaxy.” The ideas time had come.
So whatever ideas keep nudging you. Whatever thing you want to do. Whatever you want to create, be is a book, a song, a painting, a business, a product, a vocation. Follow it. It’s cosmic truth trying to find physical space in the world through you. And who knows? Maybe you can manifest it better than anyone else can.
Because this nudging. This energy that we feel when struck by an idea. It is not generated by us. We are caught up in it. We picked it up from the work itself. It contains a charge. A contagious vitality that pulls us forward.
Work hinting at greatness contains a charge we can feel, like static before a lighting storm. The energy of creation feels similar to another force in the universe. Love. A kinetic draw beyond rational comprehension. An excitement.
When you find an idea, or person, that draws your interest, that makes your needle jump. Something that indicates its worthy of your attention, and perhaps your devotion. It holds the potential to sustain your interest and make the effort worthwhile. That is love. And that is the creative act.
Art is a circulation of energetic ideas. What makes them appear new is they’re combining differently each time they come back. No two clouds are the same. This is why, when we’re struck by a new piece of art, it can resonate on a deeper level.
Perhaps this is the familiar coming back to us in an unfamiliar form. Or maybe it is something unknown that we didn’t realize we were looking for. A feeling that we always wished we knew how to define, that another has now been able to describe in words or pictures.
Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seem smaller. It changes the unearthly into the earthly. The imagination has no limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.
Most often, the hints of inspiration and direction from, as Rubin would call it, Source, are small. They appear as tiny signals traveling through the void of space: quiet and subtle. To hear the whispers, our mind must also be quiet. We pay close attention on all fronts. Our antennae sensitively tuned.
Boosting receptivity may require a relaxing of effort. If we’re trying to solve a problem, the trying can get in the way. Splashing a pond stirs up clouds of mud. In relaxing the mind we have greater clarity to hear the whispers. In addition to meditation, we may softly hold a question in our mind as we go for a walk, swim, shower or drive.
The question is being worked on, held loosely in our awareness. We are posing it gently to the universe and opening ourselves up to receiving the answer. Sometimes the words seem to arise from the outside, and other times, the inside. Whatever route the information arrives through, we allow it to come by grace, not effort. Inspiration cannot be wrestled into existence, only welcomed with an open state of mind.
Analysis is a secondary function to our awareness. The awareness happens first as a pure connection with the object of your attention. If something strikes you as interesting or beautiful, first, try to live that experience. Only afterwards should you try to understand it. Machines will soon be able to analyze things 10x better than we can. But they may never be able to live an experience that is sublime, interesting or beautiful.
The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible.
No matter what tools you use to create, the true instrument is you. And through you, the universe that surrounds us all comes into focus.
It’s not unusual for science to catch up to art, eventually, nor it is unusual for art to catch up to the spiritual. Think about the science fiction books and movies of the past. Works of art and literature. And yet, we have created and surpassed many of the wildest expectations of the past at one point considered fiction. Science eventually catches up to art, and art slowly catches up to the divine. Art is the expression of truth which is not yet explicable to the conscious mind, and yet, is something we all know to be true through our connection with it.
Material for our work surrounds us at every turn. It’s woven into conversation, nature, change encounters, and existing works of art. These transmissions are subtle, ever present, yet easy to miss. The ego yells, intuition whispers. If we aren’t listening, these whispers will pass us by. Notice the connections and see where they lead.
A good way to do this is through a practice. A practice is an embodiment of an approach to a concept. This can support us in bringing about a desired state of mind. When we repeat the exercise of opening our senses to what is, we move closer to living in a continually open state.
We build a habit where expanded awareness is our default way of being in the world. We take notice of the cycles of the planet and choose to live in accordance with its seasons. We become connected and begin to see ourselves as part of a greater whole that is constantly regenerating itself.
And we may tap into this all-powerful propagating force and ride its creative waves. The purpose of practice is not necessarily in the doing, just as the goal of meditation is not the meditating.
The purpose is to evolve the way we see the world when we’re engaged in these acts. We are building the musculature of our psyche to more acutely tune in. This is so much of what the work is about. Awareness needs constant refreshing. If it becomes a habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again. Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.
Which leads us to the aspect of choices:
If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from books than from the media.
This applies to every choice we make. Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great, great from excellent. They help us determine what is worthy of our time and attention. This is how you cultivate taste.
Connection: There are sides of ourselves that aren’t welcome in polite society. Thoughts and feelings too dark to share. When we recognize them in art, we feel less alone. More real. More human.
When we’re feeling alone we can connect with a group of friends who love and care for each other. When we long for true love we can watch or read about sweeping romances. When we feel downtrodden we can watch movies or connect with characters undergoing their own hero’s journey.
When we feel like celebrating we can engage with books or shows that showcase the good times. Art creates a profound connection between the artist and the audience. Through that connection, both can heal. Art is a place where vulnerability can be revealed. And people only connect through true vulnerability.
And allowing yourself to be vulnerable in your art can build your courage to allow vulnerability in everyday life, and the relationships in your own life can grow stronger as a result. The whole point of art, according to the ancient Greeks, was to achieve catharsis. Catharsis can be defined as the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions.
That was the point of art in Ancient Greek society. When you went to the theater, it was to cleanse yourself. It was a place where you could forget about rules and decorum. It was the place where every aspect of the human experience could be put on display, and in a darkened amphitheater, we could connect with our emotions, and allow them to be released.
You can see why Martin Scorsese, according to this definition, refers to Marvel movies as theme park rides, and why fans of a beloved franchise get so upset when characters who have shaped them, healed them, given them company when lonely and been there for them at rock bottom, are reduced to one dimensional shadows of their former selves, existing only to sell plush toys at $9.99 a pop.
You have to know the rules so you can break them like an artist:
The most deceptive rules are not the ones we can see, but the ones we can’t. These are the ones that can be found hiding deeper in the mind, often unnoticed, just beyond conscious awareness. Rules that entered into our thinking through childhood programming, lessons we’ve forgotten, osmosis from the culture, and emulating the artists who inspired us to try it for ourselves.
These rules can serve or limit us. Be aware of any assumptions based on conventional wisdom. Rules obeyed unconsciously are far stronger than the ones set on purpose. And they are more likely to undermine the work. As you move away from familiar or conscious rules, you may bump up against hidden rules that have been guiding you all along, without your knowledge. Once recognized, these rules may be released or used with more intention.
Patience:
Patience is developed much like awareness. Through acceptance of what is. Impatience is an argument with reality. The desire for something to be different from what we are experiencing in the here and now. A wish for time to speed up, tomorrow to come sooner, an aching to relive yesterday, or to close your eyes and open them to find yourself in another place. There’s a stoic saying. When you go to a public bath, remind yourself of what you are likely to find there. There may be other people, screaming children, heavily chlorinated water, or not enough towels. The object isn’t to wish for these things to be different. The object is to be in harmony with what is.
Inspiration:
Talent is the ability to let ideas manifest themselves through you. The world inspire comes from the Latin: inspirare, meaning to blow into or blow into, much the same way God fashioned Man and then gave him breath in Genesis. The universe seeks balance. For the mind to draw inspiration, it needs space. By creating space in your mind, you are inviting inspiration.
The same principle applies to everything in life. If we are looking for a new relationship when we are already in one, or can’t move on from the last one, we don’t have that emotional space to accommodate a new one. To vary your inspiration, vary your inputs. Turn off the sound when watching a favorite film, or play music while muting the dialogue. Read only the first word of each sentence of a short story aloud. Arrange stones by size and color. Learn to lucid dream. Break habits. Look for differences. Notice connections between unlike things.
Habits:
Discipline and freedom seem like opposites, but in reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time. Habits that not conducive to the work (or to life) include:
Believing you're not good enough.
Feeling like you don’t have the energy it will take.
Mistaking adopted rules or beliefs for absolutes.
Not wanting to do the work.
Not taking the work to its highest potential, settling.
Having goals too ambitious to even begin.
Thinking you can only do your best work under certain conditions. Requiring specific equipment to do the work.
Abandoning a project as soon as it gets difficult.
Feeling like you need permission or acceptance to move forward.
Letting a perceived need for funding, equipment or acceptance to get in the way.
Having too many ideas and not choosing one. As Marc Randolph would say, co-founder of Netlix, All ideas are bad ideas. It's in the execution you discover if they will work in the reality or not.
Never finishing projects.
Blaming circumstances or people for getting in the way.
Romanticizing negative behaviors, additions or patterns.
Believing a mood or state of being must be present. Impatience, distractibility or procrastination.
Greatness:
Imagine you are going to live on a mountaintop, by yourself, forever. You build a home no one will visit. But it will be your home, so you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you will spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows, all are magnificent. Curated exactly for your taste. This is the essence of great art. We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourselves to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints. We do the best, as we see the best with our own taste. If you think, “I don’t like it but someone else will,” you find yourself in the business of commerce, where you are creating a product to satisfy a need in the market. The more formulaic something is, the more it hugs the shore of trendy, the less art it is likely to be.
Fear of criticism, attachment to commercial success, competition with past work. An aspiration of wanting to change the world, any narrative that differs from “I want to make this work the best that it can be. I want to actualize the potential of this idea” undermines the potential of an idea in the pursuit of greatness.
Instead of focusing on what this will get you, focus on pouring yourself into the art so it can be the best that it can be. With the simple objective of doing great work, a ripple effect occurs. A bar is set for everything you do, which may not only lift your work to new heights, but raise the vibration of your entire life. It may even inspire others to do their best work. Greatness begets greatness. Living and speaking your authentic truth gives others permission to do the same. It’s infectious.
Success:
How shall we measure success? It isn’t popularity, money, or critical esteem. Success occurs in the privacy of the soul. It comes in the moment you decide to release the work. The moment you decide to live your authentic truth. Before exposure to a single opinion. When you’ve done all you can to bring out the work’s greatest potential. Success has nothing to do with the variables you can’t control. If we can tune into the idea of making things and sharing them without being attached to the outcome, the work is more likely to arrive in its truest form. In the same way, if we can connect with others without being worried about outcome, how they perceive us, will they like us, what can they do for us, the relationship is likely to develop in its truest form.
Connected Detachment:
When faced with challenges, consider detaching from the story of your life as it's happening. As hard as it may seem, seek to experience events as if you’re watching a movie. You’re observing a dramatic scene where the protagonist faces a seemingly insurmountable challenge. It’s you, but it's not you. Instead of sinking into the pain of heartbreak, or the stress of being laid off, or the grief of loss, practicing detachment might sound like: that was a plot twist, I wonder what’s going to happen next. The outcome is not the end. The darkness will not last, nor will the light. They live in a continual unfolding, a mutually dependent cycle. Neither is bad nor good. They simply exist. This is the practice of never assuming you know the whole story. And it will support you in a life of open possibility and equanimity. When we obsessively focus on these events, they may appear catastrophic. But they’re just a small aspect of a larger life, and the further you zoom back, the smaller each experience becomes. Zoom in and obsess. Zoom out and observe. The choice is yours. If we allow this principle to work on us, our imagination frees us from the web of personal and cultural stories engulfing us. Art has the power to snap us out of our transfixion, open our minds to what’s possible, and reconnect to the eternal energy that moves through all things.
The ecstatic:
Have you ever felt pulled in, as if entranced, while listening to a piece of music? How about while reading a book or gazing at painting? Have you ever allowed tears to flow, unbidden during the climax and catharsis of a show or book. This may be one of the reasons you’re drawn to creative work to begin with. It’s the flow state that removes you from the world and connects you to a state of pure awareness with the ultimate intelligence. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, the work is the reward. Feel free to have an ice cream sundae afterward. It will pale in comparison. This is ecstasy.
The memory, the recurring experience of sensory joy. It’s like taking a bite of fruit at peak ripeness. Now think of everything held in a work that comes before that moment of perfect balance. All the experiments that miss the mark. The ideas that go nowhere. The difficult decisions made. The darlings killed. The tiny adjustment which changed everything. What is the test an artist uses in those crucial moments during the process? You could say it is a feeling. An inner voice. A silent whisper that makes you laugh. An energy that enters the room and possesses the body. Call it joy, awe or elation.
When a sense of harmony and fulfillment prevails. It is an arising of the ecstatic. It is so invigorating it makes all the laborious, less interesting parts of the work worth doing. We are mining for these events: the moments where the dots connect. The artwork is the point where all the elements come together – the universe, the prism of self, the magic and discipline of transmuting idea to flesh. And if these lead you to contradiction, into territories that seem unbridgeable or unknown, that doesn’t mean they’re not harmonious. Even in perceived chaos, there is order and pattern. A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story or concrete meaning is immense enough to contain.
Authenticity and non-competition:
Wanting to outperform another artist or another person, for that matter, rarely results in greatness. Nor is it a mindset that has a healthy impact on our lives. As Teddy Roosevelt pointed out, comparison is the thief of joy.
Besides, why would we want to create, or live, with the purpose of diminishing someone else? Such a fate sounds like hell on earth. When another great work inspires us to elevate our own, this energy is different. Seeing the bar raised in our field can encourage us to reach even higher. This energy of rising-to-meet is quite different from that of conquering. We are dealing in the realm of magic. No one knows why or how it truly works. You work not as an evangelist expecting miracles, but as a scientist, testing, adjusting, and testing again. Experimenting and building on results.
Faith is rewarded, at times, more than talent or ability. After all, how can we offer art what it needs without blind trust in the process? We are required to believe in something that does not yet exist in order to allow it to come into being. Your path is unique, for only you to follow. There is no single route to great art. This does not mean ignoring the wisdom of others. Receive it skillfully. Try it on for size. See how it fits. Incorporate what’s useful. Let go of the rest. And now matter how credible the source, test and tune in to yourself to discover what works for you.
Self Awareness: As children, few of us are taught how to understand or prioritize our feelings. For the most part, the educational system does not ask us to assess our sensitivity, but rather, to be obedient. To do what is expected. Our natural independent spirit is tamed. Free thought is constrained. There is a set of rules and expectations put upon us that is not about exploring who we are and what we are capable of.
The system is not here for our benefit. It holds us back as individuals to support its own continued existence. This is particularly undermining to independent thinking and free expression. Especially at this moment in time where cancel-culture threatens the livelihood of anyone person from any field, and as dissenting opinions are branded conspiracy theories, and as blatant propaganda is espoused as fact.
As artists and human beings, our mission is not to fit in, nor to conform. Our purpose is to value and develop our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and cultivate respect for the authenticity of others. We extend our reach for a higher consciousness. Releasing attachment to our perceived self and limitations. We are seeking not to define ourselves, but to expand ourselves. To tune in to the limitlessness of nature and connection to all that is. Self awareness is a transcendence. An abandonment of the ego. Of letting go.
We are part of a constant, interconnected cycle of birth, death and regeneration. Our bodies decay into the earth to bring forth new life, our energetic mind is returned to the universe to be repurposed. Energy is never created or destroyed, only repurposed. Art exists in this same cycle of death and rebirth. We participate in this by completing one project so that we can begin anew.
As in life, each ending invites a fresh beginning. When consumed with a single work to the degree that we believe it's our life’s mission, there’s no room for the next one to develop. Just as when we can’t let go of the past or can’t embrace new experiences, our life grows stale. The artist's goal is greatness. But there is a moment of perfect ripeness. Of balance. And at that moment, it is time to let the work go, and begin anew. Sharing art is the price of making it. Exposing your vulnerability if the fee.
Legacy:
As you deepen your participation in the creative act, you may come across a paradox. Ultimately, the act of self expression is not about you, just as love is not about you. We feel compelled to engage, as if by primal instinct. We must follow this instinct. To deny it is dispiriting, as if we are in violation of nature.
As Henry David Thoreau said, “If a flower cannot live according to its nature, it dies. So to a man.” This is the call to self-express, our creative purpose. It's not necessarily to understand ourselves or be understood. We share our prism, our way of seeing, in order to spark an echo in others. Art is the reverberation of the impermanence of life. As human beings, we come and go quickly and we get to make works that stand as monuments of our time here.
Enduring affirmations of existence. From Michelangelo's David, to graffiti in a bathroom stall, from the first cave paintings, to a child’s finger painted landscapes, they all echo the same cry: I was here. Creativity is an asymmetric skill. Once you create something from nothing, it has the potential to scale infinitely. It can touch the lives of millions. It can give people hope or comfort the lonely or those in pain. It can carry you through the darkness, or help you relax in the light of the sun. It can live a life decades, centuries, or millennia longer than you ever could.
The goal of art isn’t to attain perfection as the goal of any human life isn’t to live it in a perfect way. The goal is to share who we are and how we see the world. Art allows us to see what we are unable to see, and yet, already know.
Efforts to portray a point of view on purpose often lead to a false representation. We hold on to stories about our perspective that are inaccurate and limiting. Wayne Dyer said when you squeeze an orange, what comes out is orange juice. When you get squeezed by life, whatever comes out is what’s inside you. And part of that extract is the point of view you didn’t even know you had. It’s baked into the art you make and the opinions you share.
When you create, the art comes first, you come next, the audience and third parties come last. There is an integrity to the art. An idea is something pure and our job is to transmute and transmit the idea in its purest form. Diluting the idea to appeal to an audience, a cultural trend, to use it as a mouthpiece for a political agenda, or to maximize its commercial potential is to abuse the child the universe has entrusted you to nurture.
You are the steward of this idea, and it is your job support the idea into whatever it is supposed to be. It is not your job to change the idea or force it to conform to your agenda. The work of art serves its purpose independent of the creator’s interest in social responsibility. Wanting to change people’s minds about an issue or have an effect on society may interfere with the quality and purity of the work.
This doesn’t mean the work won’t have these latent effects, but we don’t get there by planning them. In the creative process, it's more difficult to accomplish a goal by aiming at it. Deciding what’s best to say in advance doesn’t allow what’s best to come. It's best to wait until a work is finished to decide what its saying. Theme and motif will emerge. Holding your work hostage to meaning is a limitation.
As Oscar Wilde said, "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Work that attempts to be overly preachy often doesn’t connect as hoped, while a piece not intended to address a societal ill may become an anthem for a revolution. Art is far more powerful than our plans for it. Art can’t be responsible or irresponsible. Art is above and beyond judgment.
It can’t be censored or deemed “offensive”. It either speaks to you, or it doesn’t. It either is for you, or it isn’t. An artist's only responsibility is to the art itself. If there were anything you might stand for, it would be to defend this creative autonomy. Not just from outside censors, but from the voices in your head that have internalized what is considered acceptable. The world is only as free as it allows its artists to be. And you are only as free as you allow yourself to be in allowing yourself to be authentic and vulnerable.
For parting words, I’ll leave you with these. No matter what anyone tells you, words and ideas can change the world. -Robin Williams
Beneath this mask is not merely flesh, but an idea. And what you fail to understand, Mr. Creedy, is that ideas are bullet proof. -V, from V for Vendetta.
Light and love my friends. Go in peace to love and serve.
Outro: 1812 Overture, Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky
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