I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
Art history is the knowledge and study of art. To interpret and analyze art, its characteristics, its reason of being, its function, it has to be placed in a context, and it is the context of its production that informs about its value as human activity. To do history about art is to relate it to the culture that produced it, to learn about its geography, to place it in the chronology of its evolution. Art history, then, follows a methodology that aspires to be as scientific as possible, and so it adapts to evidence, emerging technologies and evolving sensibilities. Kleiner outlines several criteria used by art historians, such as age, style, subject matter, authorship, and patronage, to learn about an art object or an artwork’s history, about what it represents about its culture and human history at large.
Art is an activity best defined by its function: it communicates, it expresses a message. To somewhat narrow it down, art pertains to culture, which is largely understood as all human activity. Before what anthropology considers civilization, there were examples of people creating iconography, communicating a message that might have had some relevance, some practical function, as it is speculated. Art too can be created for mere pleasure, as the manifestation of personal will, of identity. Whether art is an individual or a group benefit, it is not an either/or question. Art is a social activity. It can take the form of small objects or large buildings, it can be manifested in many aspects of society. As it is a social activity, it has value: material monetary value and intangible cultural value.
Art is in dialogue with other disciplines of knowledge. When doing art history, it is important to determine when an artwork can serve as an historical object - because it is part of an antique infrastructure or it depicts a historical event - and when it serves a communicational purpose that is not historically accurate. It can represent ideas - or ideals, more precisely - just as it can represent observable reality. Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware conveys not a historical occurrence, but an idea about a historical figure. This same dynamic applies, more clearly, in representations of mythology and religious texts, which are taken as different from historical facts, yet they serve an ideological purpose, and they can inform much of a society’s history.
Art history is a discipline that intertwines the often literary and subjective world of art and the scientific exercise of history. The purpose of art history is, as it is of any research, to better understand humanity using the totality of the past, the cumulative corpus of creative activity. It examines perspectives, ideologies, temporalities, norms, hierarchies, and therefore it is a valuable branch of the social sciences.
Reference
Gardner, H., Kleiner, F. S. (2017). Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Concise Global History. United States: Cengage Learning.
everything i wanted to be in the cup in my hand, i find it in the cup that sits on the table in front of me. staning the papers that were laid out beneath it. i look hopefully inside the cup in my hand. it is the most favourite utensil of mine. its handle is broken and it has cracks at the edge of its mouth. still i do not seem to care and hold it layering both of my hands clenched to that cup. even though it sometimes leaves stains on the collar of my shirt due to its uneven cracks. it sometimes also burns out my hand due to the hot coffee in it. it doesn’t have a handle, remember? that cup is still so dear to me. it is blue in colour. i look at the cup that sits on the table desperately wishing to be picked by me. it is yellow. i feel bad for that cup for it has all the things that my blue cup lacks. it is new with soft edges and a very fine handle. i eye the insides of my blue cup and it suddenly shatters in my hand leaving me bruised. blood slides down from my fingers and i can taste the feeling of abandonment. again. my blue abandoned me yet again. i cry and fill up yellow with my tears. it stays calm and collects everything without complaints. i don’t pick yellow up. i am scared of abandonments. i ask yellow how long will it stay? how long will it wait? “you know waiting is so beautiful if it ends with you” yellow has this carved besides its handle. and i tear up again. i look forward to the day i can pick up yellow without any hesitation. when i can fill it up with my favourite desserts. i really hope blue is at peace though. i miss blue. it is still my favourite cup.
What is Aesthetics? A Study of the New Art Movement that Art History is Looking Over
It started on tumblr [citation needed], we've all seen the "a e s t h e t i c" tags and all the blogs dedicated to the many many different types of aesthetics. I have spent the better part of 4 years collecting, studying, and categorizing theses aesthetics. I do have a formal education in art and architecture so I sort of know what I'm talking about. I'd like to share with you what I've found. I've also made a chart (link) of my findings. This chart is very rough and not meant to be taken as fact. It is how I've categorized almost 700 different aesthetics but that is not even close to how many there are. I do plan on expanding it more. If I get some attention, maybe I'll make more posts that dive deeper into defining this new art movement.
In short, today's use of the word "Aesthetic" is a noun that refers to a title/word given to a specific atmosphere, emotion, feeling, or vibe that a collection of images evokes when viewed together. A comparable approximation would be a "mood board".
Anything can belong to a particular Aesthetic; an art piece, a song, an entire show, an outfit, etc. In my opinion however, its very rare that a singular work can express an entire aesthetic. As stated, an aesthetic is a very specific emotion. Thus, in most cases, a singular work (work here referring to any form of expression) is likely to be interpreted in a multitude of different ways. The only exception to this is if a particular aesthetic is based on a very specific motif found in a particular work that is unique to only that work and from there new pieces can be made that also carry that motif or relate to the original work that the aesthetic was built upon. This will be discussed later. Not every genre of art can express an aesthetic, for example, some aesthetics may not translate very well to fashion, imagery, music, etc. That is to say that it may not be possible to express the emotion evoked by the aesthetic through other mediums other than the original medium the aesthetic was created in.
In summary, an aesthetic is a collection of images that evokes a specific emotion. Most often, this emotion is evoked through the combination of particular motifs found in each work that contribute to an overall "vibe" or atmosphere. These motifs can then be used to create new original works that belong to this aesthetic.
There are a multitude of categories of Aesthetics that I have identified and some of them may seemingly contradict this definition. We will discuss these later. There is also much overlap between specific aesthetics, it is extremely common to find that an art piece may belong to multiple different aesthetics.
This is a very brief definition of the movement. But to fully grasp the depths of this new art movement, we will need to discuss a lot of art history and definitions.
I encourage you to have a seat and read this little ‘essay’ I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I’m doing today. I would be really grateful and I’m sure you’ll have a much better understanding of my whole work.
Digital walls, but walls
On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be “painted” but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating…
A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the “warlike coexistence” with the advertising).
The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.
Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.
The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.
At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing” first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.
It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the “erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous” characters or the concept of “famonimity”; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.
Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the “leftovers” after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc….. With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.
Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.
Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.
There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting…. Except for the birth of new “isms” within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation… Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.
But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. “Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers…
This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.
Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art” are the people.
I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.
Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.
A crazed rant on Hamlet, art in modernity, Susan Sontag, and female power in Christian theology
The feminine urge to be daddy's mommy. — — Natalie Wynn, Contrapoints
This is the first of my series of meditations based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which I have been studying as part of English literature A-level. It is the basis on which I expand into wider general reflections on culture and philosophy, linking to other things I’ve read or watched recently.
This piece begins as art criticism about excessive author presence in modern art, with allusion to Hamlet as an embodiment of such modern artist. But then it kind of diverges into a theological tangent and ultimately an argument about gender and female power in Christian myths.
It doesn’t really neatly belong to any specific literary category. It is essay-like, but is full of poetic logic. Perhaps just read it as a kind of unhinged diary entry or notes app notes that should have stayed in the drafts.
— — Z
1
Modern authors, perhaps due to their peculiar awareness of themselves as authors, have felt this exceeding sense of self-inflicted obligation, that they have to force their authorships onto the audience, to make them aware that what they’re seeing, is in fact, created by them. And not just by the world.
‘What a piece of work / Is a man!’ Hamlet, II, ii, 301–302
What I mean by this could be seen most obviously in the attempt that modern authors try to push “message” into their works, or simply the conscious attempt to have any message at all. Consciousness is really the crime here. There is a kind of forcedness in modern art, a lack of the grace, the relaxed effortlessness that is so prevalent in classical, canonical art. Modern art is always agitating, in a permanent state of anxiety and uncertainty in whether it has “correctly” communicated its message to its audience.
Notes: Hamlet is seen by many as Shakespeare’s most philosophical play, his most message-heavy work, with deep contemplations on the nature of existence.
The long soliloquies of the eponymous prince has long been described as rigorously academic in style, perhaps most famously, in the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. It is the most decontextualised soliloquy uttered by the prince, in which he solely speaks on the conceptual matters of life and death.
Yet this intellectual aspect of the play might perhaps what Shakespeare precisely is trying to satirise here. A tormenting, self-cannibalising, painful intellectual interiority, emerging in the early modern West, with its deep Christian moralism and inhuman rationalism, is here presented as precisely what drives the main character, and those around him, into misfortunes.
‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’
Hamlet, II. ii. 538
The dramatic forcedness of Hamlet's messaging is perhaps most evident in the almost ravage-like scene in Gertrude's chamber (III, vi), in which he almost embodies the incestuous and murderous Nero.
'Let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural.'
III. ii. 366-368
Susan Sontag said that art should be flirtation, not rape. Well, many modern art feels like rape to me. They feel like rape in the way that they try to force one singular thing onto its recipient. It refuses a defused, tender sensuality that slowly transmits and triggers desires through a landscape of polyamorous tenderness. Instead, it is strictly patriarchal, scriptural, the word of the Father, of God, Author The Creator. There is a violence to it. But more so there is a naivety to it.
The violence is in the naivety. In its brutal attempt to not appear naive, but rather adultly, scholarly, fatherly, like the son who resolves the Oedipus complex by identifying with the father to escape the fate of castration. The dwarf dressed in the giant’s robes.
‘But two months dead — nay, not so much, not two-
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!’
‘My father’s brother, but no more like my father/ Than I to Hercules’
Hamlet comparing his father to his uncle, the current King Cladius, and himself, I. ii. 138–142; 153–154
This is the modern author. The anxious son, boy, fearing castration, if not already castrated, living in the shadow of the father, haunted by him, resenting his mother, the wanton, the whore, the true artistry of the world.
Hamlet (1949). Laurence Olivier
True art is always promiscuous. She is the Saint of All Sins. The Virgin in the Brothel. The Whore in the Church. The Holy Witch. The High Priestess of Filth. She is a woman. She is mother. The Oracle (whose words are obscure because they’re divine, not to Him the God, but the real, hedonistic god of music and joy, through whom she is enlightened in darkness). The Sea. Shall I moor tonight in thee.
Twilight, Contrapoints, Natalie Wynn
He, the God, and Her, Nature, whose fundamental battle is once again reenacted in this.
Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God moved upon the face of waters. God moved on top of the sea, God on nature, man on woman, reason on art, this is the fundamental violation, the real original sin, the forbidden fruit of knowledge, brought forth by Himself through his very presence. The fault of the Fall is not in us. It is in Him. For to be holy is to be aware of the profane, as the opposite is equally true. Therefore to be profane, to be sinful, is precisely to be aware of the existence of the hallow. To learn about it. To aspire to it. Without sin, there would be no God. Like there would be no man without woman.
‘Whatever is the subject of a prohibition is basically sacred’.
‘The taboo does not banish the transgression but, on the contrary, depends upon it, just as the transgression depends on the existence of the taboo: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it”.’
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality
‘That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.’
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
Notes: St. Augustine of Hippo wrote that original sin is transmitted by concupiscence and enfeebles freedom of the will without destroying it. But isn’t will also what precisely drove one (Eve) to the origional sin? Perhaps the will is much like Kant’s conception of freedom, a thing that creates its own limits.
Without an elusive ideal to aspire to, we will never be aware of our skin-felt wretchedness. The fruit is not only planted by God, it is God, it is God who eats the fruit, it is God who is the fruit being eaten, and it is God who is watching all of this.
I find it interesting. The closeness between the angel and Satan. Almost mirror images. In Michelangelo’s painting of the sin of Adam and Eve from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
The decision to have the woman be the one to eat the fruit therefore, is interesting, on multiple levels. She is the original sinner, but also the one closest to God. For the fruit is God, but the fruit is also sin, and it is through the death of the man that she (gives birth to) achieves salvation. She is sin, but she is sin in grace, the glorified sin, the sin made divine, the virgin who gives birth, saved from stoning (here she also mirrors the other Mary, the other permitted sinner, Mary Magdalen), who gives birth to the man who is going to die, through which she successfully redeems herself. She is the mother, and she is the sinner, the original in both, and in both she is holy.
Eve is Mary and Mary is Eve.
The tree of death and of life in the Salzburg Missal: Eve gives the representatives of the old covenant the fruit that brings sin and death from the tree of paradise. Mary, on the other hand, gives the faith hosts, the bread of life. — — The New Eve (Latin: Nova Eva) is a devotional title for Mary, the mother of Jesus. Since the second century, numerous Eastern and Western Church fathers have expressed this doctrinal idea as an analogy to the biblical concept of the New Adam.
The man is essentially an accessory to her, a passage through which she penetrates through to achieve her eventual goal. He is only a thing that she decorates herself with. The baby in her bosom. The man on her laps (Pietà). The feminine urge to be daddy’s mommy. The gravedigger, whose death goes unmentioned, outlived everyone. Her blue robe is serene, like the halcyon sea.
Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child, painted in 1480, shows a reflective Mary in deep blue.
Z
17.03.2024
(with notes later added 24.03.24)
Source:
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, On Style, The artist as examplary sufferer
Natalie Wynn, Contrapoints, Twilight
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Story of the Eye
Janet Adelman, Man and Wife Is One Flesh: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body
I have also posted this on Medium.
Thoughts on Hamlet, art in modernity, Susan Sontag, and the feminism within Christian theology
"Abstraction is flying. Abstracting is ascending to higher and higher levels of conceptual generalization; soaring back and forth, reflectively circling around above the specificity and immediacy of things and events in space and time, from a perspective that embeds them in a conceptual framework of increasing breadth and depth, a framework without horizon, ceil-ing, or basement; a framework composed of increasingly comprehensive concepts that generalize over increasingly comprehensive classes of things, organize them relative to one another, unify them into a coherent tapestry, a dizzying object of contemplation the details of which stun one into panic by their connectedness, significance, and vividness.
Abstraction is also flight. It is freedom from the immediate spatiotemporal constraints of the moment; freedom to plan the future, recall the past, comprehend the present from a reflective perspective that incorporates all three; freedom from the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, freedom to imagine the possible and transport oneself into it; freedom to survey the real as a resource for embodying the possible; freedom to detach the realized object from oneself more and more fully as a self-contained entity, fully determined by its contextual properties and relations, and consider it from afar, as new grist for the mill of the possible. Abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them. Abstraction is a solitary journey through the conceptual uni-verse, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to. Abstraction makes one love material objects all the more."
--Adrian Piper
From Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987, Alternative Museum, New York City April 18-May 30, 1987.
Happy Monday, everyone! I’m back with some more motivation to start your week off right (and write) ✨
I’ve received some amazing DM messages this past week, both supporting my works and asking for writing advice. So, I figured I’d share a little bit of my own philosophy here:
Your writing and art doesn’t have to be perfect. Seriously. Humans aren’t perfect, so why should we hold ourselves to unreachable standards? It is inevitable for us to make a mistake, and that is perfectly okay.
Do you know how many times I reread and edited Peter Hart? A lot. There were still a few errors that made it past the final draft. I kind of chuckle when I read them now, and recall that there were typos that made it through print on some of my favorite childhood books. It happens. But…I don’t remember the typos. I don’t remember the minor errors—I remember the stories.
Think back to your favorite book series—do you recall a typo or printing error? Even so, it’s most likely not a big deal. What matters is you’ve tried, you polished, you’ve presented the best possible art you could. And, most importantly: you ENJOYED it.
Art without passion and emotion from the soul is hollow. This is why AI can never “create” art like we can. People get their feelings of anger, joy, sorrow, love, lament… deeply human emotions, out there. It’s vulnerable, it’s beautiful. It’s human. That’s why writing and the arts are part of the humanities.
Look, I get it: If it’s a job, sometimes you have to push through feelings of lower motivation to reach a quota. But I always harken back to the beginning: Why did you begin in the first place? What inspired you to pick up writing or art as a career? What sparked the creativity in your soul, that you wanted to share your passion and vulnerability with the world? If you lose sight of that, you lose sight of what makes art enjoyable: the fact that it was created by YOU. Do you know how freeing that is? YOU are the masters of your own world.
Wonderful people, your art is beautiful because it is uniquely yours. And nobody can take that joy away from you other than yourself. So why not enjoy what you do? Why not find happiness in your penstroke? Why not lift yourselves up, instead of tearing your beautiful hearts down? Life’s too short, lovelies.
Do what you want. Love who you are. Love what you do. Love what you love. 💖💫
What if… I process all my emotions… through fiber arts?
There are a multitude of dimensions that make various mediums ideal for therapy.
They tend to be low-demand for attention while requiring movement and repetition, so you can think and track how present you are by your speed and progress.
Needlework like embroidery and sewing require focus to avoid pricks, which can also be grounding if you can work with pain in a controlled manner.
Plus embroidery can be done on most mass-produced clothing, so you can do it with the clothes on your back with some floss (embroidery floss) or thread and a needle— we embroider our sleeves and tuck the needle diagonally into our ring when we’re not using it.
Some yarns can be crocheted or knit into fabric with just your fingers. Crochet hooks are similar in size to a pencil, and you can pause by closing the last loop you worked on and starting a new strand next loop.
Beadwork is so nice to touch. Embroidery, weaving, knotwork and jewelry. It’s not so easily portable, but it’s easy to make pretty without much technique.
Have you ever made your own rope or yarn? That’s gratifying, starting from plants and animals and ending up with netting and blankets.
And it is the fondness of making, turning one thing into another into another. Create and tailor your clothes, never have to figure out recycling fabrics, save money patching and reusing.
Writing Tips For You (as if I don’t currently have insane writer’s block)
-Can’t start a scene? Write the setting instead. What is the lighting like? Is this place comfortable? Is it familiar or not? What should you point out now so it doesn’t suddenly appear when it becomes important for the characters? SET! YOUR! STAGE!
-Everyone says “show, don’t tell”. I like to think of that as “what are your character’s physical reactions? What are they feeling?” You can say “Character looked dismayed”, or you can say “Character grimaced with dismay.” See the difference?
-Struggling with dialogue? Talk to yourself while you’re writing. You might be blocking yourself if you subconsciously think some dialogue feels unnatural.
-Context, context, context! This applies to everything from the small interactions to the big plots. Every force has an equal and opposite reaction, allow interactions and events to grow as such.
-Context, context, context pt 2! But worldbuilding! If your character is performing an act, how does that fit into the physical reality they already exist in? How is it possible? Can you imply (imply, not explain) that these things are commonplace or why they wouldn’t be?
-Build the action. (Stealing this from theater class like twelve years ago.) You can’t just put a character into the scene and say ‘they made a sandwhich’. What has to happen for the sandwhich to be made? Your character has to walk into the kitchen, open the cupboard, get out a plate, get out the jam and peanut butter, get out a plate, get out the knives, open the fridge, get out the bread, close the fridge, open the bread bag, lay down two slices of bread on the plate, close the bag, open the first jar, pick up the first knife, scoop up the jam, slather it on the bread, put the knife down, close the first jar- and so on and so forth. Every small step is necessary for you to understand, and to engage your readers. You don’t have to go into ridiculous detail like I just did, but even understanding that for yourself.
-See above, but it’s not a scene and a sandwhich. The scene is your whole story and the sandwhich is your plot. What small steps MUST happen to reach the climax? Does changing one of those small steps change the result? How?
-Emotions are best portrayed when you have experienced them or can get insight from those who have experienced them. Let yourself get emotional in a scene. Allow yourself to be empathetic and vicariously experience what your characters are.
-Reread your own work! Your writing style and characterizations can change over time, but if you feel like you’re losing them, don’t be afraid to look at where you started to ground yourself!
-Proofread your own work 2-12 hours after you finish a section! Not while you’re writing! Don’t let yourself get carried away with writing things ‘right’, just get the ideas out.
-Have a friend or volunteer proofread for you too! This can help pick out things you repeatedly say, words you might misuse, grammar and punctuation that might need correction, and phrases that are hard to digest or don’t make sense.
-Make sure you’re making an effort to use regionally/era specific words and slang both in dialogue and in your writing. There are plenty of websites and videos online that list and discuss regional and era slang worldwide. Not to mention, we can connect with people all over the world using the web just to ask! Using incorrect phrases can really break immersion and make characters feel- well, out of character! I.E. an 80s jock saying ‘dope bruh’, American characters (generally) saying ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’, so on and so forth.
-Research research research! Research bloodloss limits, research how laws and jobs operate in different regions and countries, research weirdly specific myths and biblical themes, research as much as you can! You can only build a richer environment to write in!
-If you actively want to implement themes, allow them to reflect the experiences of your character. Example character is an Italian American who was orphaned at 13 after his orthodox Catholic parents died, he has been in and out of foster care his whole life, and the moment he got out his military job became strict and he allowed himself to be blackmailed to protect a child in a similar position. This has plenty of fun themes and symbolisms, like sacrifice, fate, lack of control, love, losing autonomy, etc, all of which can be framed under the impactful history of his Catholic childhood. This evokes the imagery of farm animals, servitude, animal tags/dog tags, holy spaces being used for other purposes. Play with it!
-Build three base playlists! One for your overarching story, one for songs that remind you of the main character and their story arc, and one for how you feel when you’re writing/songs that weirdly remind you of your story. You can cycle through these to help get into your mood.
-Consume other media! If all you do is focus on writing, you WILL lose steam and inspiration. Don’t be afraid to watch new shows, read new books, look at more artwork, read more poems, listen to more music. You might get a flicker of inspiration for themes, motives and ideas, and you’ll continue to fill yourself instead of dumping your focus out on your writing.
-Understand how each major character thinks and instinctively reacts to things. Some characters can stay calm, but others might instinctively react to things ‘angrily’, others might try to run away. This is an easy way to figure out character flaws and impliment easy conflicts.
And last but not least:
-Take breaks! Don’t worry about forcing yourself to keep a posting schedule (unless you’re being paid. I’m not. I’m doing this shit for free and for funsies) if all you do is spend all your time worrying about your writing, you won’t be able to relax your brain. Spend time with friends, play games, go outside!
The problem with "I could do [X popular modern art piece]" being responded to with "then go ahead and do it!" is that I think the point that a lot of people are making is not so much "this artwork has no value" but rather "modern popular art is a heavily gatekept industry that you cannot enter into without requisite pre-existing social cachet".
So even if someone is technically/artistically able to create something on the level of a gallery piece (and, to be honest, I think substantially more people have that ability than anyone would be likely to admit) they do not exist in an environment where they have the financial freedom or recognition for that to be possible or worthwhile.
I assure you that there are millions of people who absolutely could and would want to make Pollock style abstract paintings or giant time-consuming sculptures made with garbage or whatever, but they're currently stuck in a low wage job and if they quit in order to make their masterpiece then nobody would bat an eye and they would go broke because they wouldn't have the sociocultural weight to impart that special numinous reverence that "high art" is granted, and which makes it financially viable as a thing to spend your time doing.
It is also true that a lot of people who have that cachet are able to spend their time making pretty much whatever, and will still be able to support themselves even if the art itself is fairly mediocre outside of the time dedicated to its creation.
Anyway, I feel that people are perfectly valid in feeling a sense of vague resentment at that when they visit galleries holding paint/canvas combinations that sell for more than they will earn in several years. I mean it speaks to what society is implying about their worth as a person. I don't think that it's as much about arrogance and entitlement as people like to pretend, because a lot of that comes from buying into the mystique of the Worthy Artist anyway.
Quotes from the Pacific Rim commentary re: Guillermo del Toro's aesthetic decisions
"You cannot do world creation without filling in with texture and detail."
...
"People think that world creation - movie, for example - is the big gestures. But it isn't. It's all this small details. Look at the markings. Look at the vehicles that open the doors. Look at the banners and the markings in the crawler that moves the robot. Everything is full of detail. We designed this."
....
"We going to what I call gothic tech, or goth tech. Which is to go right away into a world that is rusting, that is in decay, where you have the concrete is cheap, the paint is chipping off, the armors in the robots is dented, it's sort of pitted and they feel like knights, like these ancient knights, and we start accumulating, for example, atmosphere."
...
"I wanted the movie to be very romantic, but not romantic in the Harlequin novel sense or the romance novel sense of the word. I wanted it to be romantic in its epicness. You know, I wanted it to feel like an opera. I wanted it to feel dramatic. So instead of doing this in a well-lit street in New York I wanted this first fight to happen in an almost like, the middle of a romantic painting, like Caspar David Friedrich is a romantic painter I adore. And I wanted very much for it to happen in the rain in the middle of a tempest in an ocean where the waves are crashing into them. And the water throughout the movie becomes an incredibly complex expressive element."
...
"We're going to go from the biggest, the widest, to the little bug of a pilot crawling out of the helmet. Isolate Raleigh. You know, we isolate Raleigh. I'm telling the story: Look at the markings on his suit, the burn marks on his skin, those are going to become scars that he's going to carry for the rest of the movie. And I'm telling you this is when we started losing. This was the price for arrogance, this was the price for youth, and we're staining the white with red. I'm trying to build a character not just by the work of the actor, but by the storytelling with audiovisual elements."
...
"And look at this, Raleigh's all introduced in this one color, he'd golden, gold colors, and he's all coated in warm greens and earth tones and the light that is bathing him is always golden, and it's about that color coming together with Mako's dominant color, and Pentecost in this case, which is connected with Mako, which are blue."
...
"So this, we come to the scene where they meet for the first time. And I have color-coded this scene entirely in those two colors, in the blue and the ambers. You know, the bright ambers and the blue, the sort of cyan blue. And this is Mako meeting Raleigh, so the entire thing needs to be color-coded like that. And Mako's blue, because I'm making her origin to the kaiju, the kaiju blue, the blood of the kaiju - but also you will see in a few minutes a memory. A memory that is all color-coded in blue and splashes of red in her past as a child. And that blue has stained her hair. Even her hair has this strands of blue because she cannot get rid of that memory. She carries it in her."
...
"We color-coded, for example, the Chinese robot, we color-coded it red and gold and is patterned after medieval armor, and it needs to feel Chinese in essence, it needs to respond to martial arts movements; its musical theme is very strong."
...
"And here again we have now a robot, a Jaeger, that is designed, a mech that is designed to resemble a T-series Russian tank, color-coded like that, with like a cooling tower from a nuclear reactor on top."
...
"And we introduce Striker Eureka, the Australian Jaeger, which is designed a little bit like an all-terrain vehicle and color-coded with the outback camouflage colors and is the most masculine of the robots, of the Jaegers, of the mech, and is very much testosterone-driven."
...
"We talked about the color red; well, here it becomes very important. We have these characters fighting that is very very color-coded to be warm; we have a lot of reddish art direction here. We color-coded this arena in black and red. The stakes, the wood, the machines, the color of the light hitting the machines, the symbols on the wall, everything is permeated with red. Because again, I wanted red to symbolize sort of the heart. And Mako's going to find her heart and Raleigh's going to find his heart, or life, by connecting with Mako. We saw him bleeding - the last time we saw red with any importance other than the Chinese robot was when he was bleeding in the beach."
...
"And again, red coming in and linking these three characters; these three characters are the heart of the movie, you know. And blood for nobility and mortality is what makes us human. And Pentecost and Raleigh and Mako are the heart of the film."
...
"And now we start bringing, literally, bringing the crazy colors into the film. I wanted to color code this movie, bring it as close as possible to a living anime, or a living incarnation of a magazine that was very important for me growing up, which is Heavy Metal with Angus McKie, Richard Corben, Chris Foss, all these guys working with super primary colors, and I wanted to bring that saturation of colors to this, and for that I needed Hannibal Chau to meet Newt in Hong Kong."
...
"In shooting the film, we then came to the final moment and again, these three characters, Mako, Raleigh, and Pentecost, which have existed in a blue-amber world start to come to a red space, you know? This is the first time we used this red space properly in this film. Other than the Chinese robot, we were very careful with not coding anything in red. But now, at the end of the adventure, everybody's coming away. And at the end of the life, at the end of their life, that is Mako, Raleigh, everybody's gonna find this light is red. And now I can talk to you about the way I sort of organized the three fights for Raleigh. I wanted one fight with the kaiju to be the fight where he loses someone. He loses his brother in the beginning. That's where he bleeds red, you know? Then the second fight in Hong Kong is where he gains a partner. He loses a partner in the first fight, he gains a partner on the second fight. And in this final fight, he saves that partner. So, it's a full circle. I show him in the construction area in the beginning sitting in a sort of throne of concrete, if you remember, when he meets Pentecost; he made an incomplete circle. And here he completes that circle."
something fascinating to me about egg discourse is how often tme people Also joke about or question their friends potential to be trans, and it's literally never talked about like this.
my cis and tme nb friends routinely joke about celebrities or characters that have big "nonbinary energy" or who otherwise exhibit behavior we would associate with ourselves. i have tme friends and acquaintances who have approached me or my wife and straightforwardly said "something seems trans about you, have I asked for your pronouns recently?"
similar friends have even talked about other still-cis friends in our circle this way, or joked about "when are you going to transition like the rest of us?" or "yeah cis people are a minority in this group, just give it time" or "no wonder you have queer friends with how comfortable with being gnc you are" or etc etc examples like that
even the actual examples of people in my life that I can think of as being the most "invasive" or presumptive about gender have been tme people:
it was my cishet friends who outed me and my wife as trans to everyone at their wedding, including their boomer parents and hundreds of strangers, and called it "the most queer wedding party ever"
it was my tme nb friend who kept saying they could "always tell" her transfem cousin was trans before she came out, and then proceeded to randomly give us extremely personal details about her bottom surgery
it was my transmasc friend who refused to call me and my wife anything other than "little enby beans" after we met and introduced us with our full genders+sexuality labels to every single person one by one at a party
it was my transmasc nb friend who kept insisting my wife could "still be nonbinary" when she was first considering identifying as a trans woman instead, and it was THAT idea that actually slowed her down from making changes to her life that she wanted
it was my cis friends who approached me arm and arm and cornered my outside of a bathroom at a party right after I took a piss to suddenly ask me what my pronouns were because they "heard something" at the party
like, transfems deserve robust support against this trash so a lot of our defensive discourse has ofc been about how it IS okay for transfems to talk about eggs and be jokey about it and non-invasively approach others about being trans
but i swear to god none of these weird people have even stopped to make their discourse ABOUT anyone BUT transfems. it's so clearly targeted!!
no one has EVER approached *me* as a tme nb person and suggested i was pressuring gnc people with my egg jokes. never. nothing even remotely similar. i joke about other people being trans all the time and no one has ever treated me the way you all are treating transfems over this issue.
important note: my examples are all things I recall as being invasive and awkward, and I'm sharing them to make a point about how often rude behavior comes from the same tme people pointing fingers over this. but I still don't think any of them are worth the crucifixion people are treating transfem egg discourse with.
even when my friends were weird to me in the above examples, my reaction was either to confront them about it as friends who I trust to be able to communicate with, or to cut those individuals off after they proved not worth a relationship in the long run. at no time did I desire to make a call-out post or spread rumors about them or publicly declare all of their gender as a screeching menace to society.
my point here is that even when I do think about moments where others crossed a line, acting like this is a "issue trans women have" is blatantly transmisogynistic garbage that only exists to serve the woman-hating machine at the heart of our society. fucking cut it out
