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Dearest mutuals, treasured followers, and esteemed guests. Kindly like this post if you wish to be involved in tag games and similar sillies.

#megg talk

pawthorn

Really hate that most people don’t understand the difference between “self-expression” and “artistic-expression.”

I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”

I am not.

I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”

I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.

I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.

This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.

Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.

It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.

But to actually understand art, you have to contextualize it beyond assuming it’s just what the artist felt like making at the moment and it’s somehow coming from their deepest soul, or you’ll badly misinterpret most art you come across.

emwheezie

"time heals all wounds" WRONG. time is chasing me with a knife

sugarsylvie

Eevee finally accepts the cone!

helenvaughans

the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat

dash-n-step

the english language is truly a wonder

scribeofpnakotis

all hail william the werewolf, proto-enby

wretchedly

Diversity win! The werewolf in your village goes by þei

bgm05

It must be defeated immediately

the-frightening-ghoul

ㅤ

ratsquinks

just one moment let me have a quick little sippy before we continue fighting

ofchaosgoddess

help I’m having ideas beyond my available free time

nothereforthedrama

help I'm having ideas beyond my available energy levels

honeyedsunlight

help I'm having ideas beyond my pricepoint

ymutate

Brian Haberlin (American, born 1963)

Pygmalion, 2025

Watercolor on paper

21 × 14 in (53.3 × 35.6 cm)

Private collection

naamahdarling

Watercolor??????

love-ardour-anarchism

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.