Artists: Geniuses or Weirdos? Maybe Both
Posted: March 27, 2014
I’ve discovered the secret of being a success in the arts community. First of all, take some time to formally familiarize yourself with all of the rules regarding, art, design, writing, sculpture, etc. Then, systematically break all of those rules! From that point forward you will be considered a genius!
Think of all of the artists that we remember most: Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh, Hemingway, The Canadian Group of Seven, J.D. Salinger, Picasso, the Beat Poets, et cetera, and you’ll find all of them, without exception, coloured outside the lines. Strange isn’t it, how a world that considers itself so refined and steeped in strict rules makes heroes of those who break said rules. But that’s the weirdness of art. After all, to be an artist of any sort is to be deemed weird from the day you take your first breath, and that’s totally fine by me. An artist by his/her very nature lives on another planet, and experiences a world of possibilities that the average person is too busy too sense. Our job is to make what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell become a real life experience for others. In order for us to do that, we have to fall out-of-sync with the rest of the world, otherwise we simply would not be artists.
Yes, I’ve heard all of the charges that have been made against artists: weird, lazy, self-absorbed, tortured, eccentric, temperamental, and so forth, and much of these charges are true to a degree. On the other hand, such characteristics come with the territory. Because to be an artist is to see the world differently we therefore we are different from others. Ours is a world full of concepts, creativity, conspiracy theories, crap shoots, non-conformity and contradiction, and none of us would have it any other way.
Think about this, art and artists hold a unique place in the world and always have. When civilizations come and go what has been left to let future generations know they existed in the first place? The frescos, the hieroglyphs, the mosaics, the scrolls, the statuary, the pottery, the cave paintings, the art. We’ll never know who the individuals were who created these things, but their legacy was being the messengers through time and space to give us a snapshot of what happened back in those ancient times.
So as weird and pretentious as the art world is deemed, now that you know the secret of being a success in the art world, and what we are truly about, what are you waiting for? Get out there and be the genius you truly are!