I have no desire to animate. Add my work to a media stream already full of fascinating hallucinations? The creativity of AI exceeds my own, with its innumerable fingers and multiple arms and morphing cat heads. Things turning into other things used to be magic worthy of hard work and years of study. Now it’s a mere artifact, a waste product generated in pursuit of the more mundane.
All my work will be forgotten, because there is so much work. Art used to be diamonds the future could sift from the dust. Now the dust is made of diamonds. I used to imagine I was making Art for the Future, but no future will find mine. I guess it’s just for me, and a small audience of the Present, and God. That’s enough, but it’s humbling. A glove has no more or less value than a feature film.
I thought Sita was future-proof because of Free Culture, but that only protected against Copyright. Cancel Culture was still to come, and there’s no protection against that except cowardice, which kills art before it’s born. And now the glut of “content” is on steroids. Attention is fractured and overwhelmed. Anything I make is buried in diamonds.
Still, I make, like writing this now. Like the countless un-named and un-indexed photos I take on my bike rides, not even worthy of my own efforts to organize. I make little posts on social media to be forgotten by the next day or, at best, next week. I chatter to my fellow monkeys, amidst the chatter of robots, as if monkeys are so starved for chatter we have to build robots to do it for us.
Yesterday at my women’s meetup M and L brought knitting. M finished a blanket she’d worked on since 2023. Every row was a different color yarn, to represent the high temperature of that day, 365 rows total. It has no commercial value. It represents countless hours of work. It will be used only by M, and seen only by a few of her friends (like us). It is Art. It will be forgotten like all art, and like all of us. We are here today only. That has to be enough.
I want to see that blanket so much!
If the history of art tells us anything, it tells us we cannot know what will be remembered. The famous are forgotten, the obscure are found, and some artists oscillate for centuries, found and forgotten again and again. Make art for art’s sake and your own. The future will find what it finds.
Ultimately, “art” was doomed as people starting paying for it, commissioning it, rating it, selling it. Are the horse paintings in cavemen caves “art” or simply representations of reality?
Ultimately, what is “art” if it’s only existed in its modern parlance for a few hundred years, since royalties discovered leisure time and decorated themselves and their entourage?
The real value of art is in the making as experienced by the maker(s). When they finish, that which they “made” becomes a relic and may meet with any number of fates, including sale, hoarding, burial, destruction by war or flood or volcano, or weathering by wind, rain, birds and erosion (much of what I make in my garden disintegrates within days). The most awesome beautiful things to my mind are gifts of nature—an intricately layered, sculpted bald-faced hornets’ nest from my garden, a large sparkling stone laced in blues and greens from a beach on Cape Cod, the tiny labyrinth of white-capped fungi sprouting from a felled log after a heavy rain. Appreciation of the impermanence of relics—whether arranged by geological movement or human hands or a hive of wasps or the growth of mycelium—adds value after the maker has finished. And there can be beauty after destruction, in ruins, in death—captured, for a time, in photographs and poetry, memoir, film, and memory. Like the universe itself the contraction and expansion, birth and death of everything is awesome. The relics made by artists are evidence of a profound cosmic convergence that could only be experienced at the point where the art was born (to paraphrase Simone Weil). To witness this evidence of creation is to witness what the religious deem miracles.
I wrote this to an old friend about 30 years ago when she got discouraged about her art and was thinking of quitting:
“Art has great power, both to heal and to announce the truth. You are a speaker for the dead, for the mystery, for life, and for the living. Though you are a painter and I am a writer, we speak with the same voice, you and I. We are both blessed and cursed to carry the conscience of our society and because we are who we are, we simply must speak out. We mock the lies our culture speaks to itself. We illuminate truths that must not be ignored. We remember what has been forgotten. We look to see that which is invisible. We mirror in ourselves the power of creation so that we may transcend our ephemeral nature and also, we make beauty for its own sake. All these benefits are secondary. We make art because we have no choice to do otherwise.” — Carmine Leo
My thoughts about the permanence and importance of art changed when I spent 3 months in Bali: they make a huge, time consuming piece of art only to destroy it in a fire that night. I still cannot understand it, but I think about it when I make my art.
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My partner of 29 years Carol Solomon died suddenly in 10 days of cancer last month. She left behind 80+ beautiful unique semi abstract paintings. She never liked the selling, business part. The last 4 days at home she could not speak of what to do with her art. Yet I sit with it all around me, and it is her immortality, it is the tangible part of her left behind. I don’t yet know what it’s future will be.
Interesting post. Reminds me mostly of the idea that humans are designed to live in groups of about 200. This global society we’ve got is fun and all. But very few of us are destined to make significant contributions in the sea of billions. Blame it on the Pareto principle if you want. But a single candle generates a guiding light. Whereas 8 billion of them would burn everything away.
Love your podcast & your art.
Grateful the internet let me find it.
You eloquently wrote what I’ve been feeling. I’m extremely bad with words and grateful when someone else can put them together for me. I have a compulsion to create and yet it also feels useless, except, as others have mentioned, it makes sense again if we reframe why we create.
I teach fine arts animation (and often mention your work) and this feels useless too. There will be no ‘jobs’ at the end of it. But I tell myself I’m not teaching animation but helping young creatives feel grounded through turbulent times, or so I try. I love your courage and the graphics of your apocalypse series!
Phew, this article and the responding comments underneath make me glad there are writers in the world.
When I scrolled through this I stopped for several minutes on each of your ‘diamonds’ references. I used to submit my short films to festivals like Sundance. When I was doing this 12 years ago with Sundance for example, I competed against maybe 800 other submitted films. Now Sundance receives nearly 20000 such films every year. I’m sure that at least 10% of these are absolute diamonds. I would not like to be on any selection jury today, breathing in so much diamond dust. Media art has become exponentially democratized in the past decade. I am sitting in a library writing this now, and I look up at the people sitting at tables around me. Half of them are writing screenplays.
Then I scrolled down to the part about M’s blanket. While reading this, the picture of that beautiful creation was at the bottom of my feed; I had not yet scrolled far enough to see it completely, only the top part. “Oh God”, I thought, “it’s another ad for office chairs”–because 10 days ago, I’d done a single Google search for office chairs, and now my FB feed is flooded with office chair ads. “OK fine, these ads are showing up on Nina’s page”. When I scrolled down further, enough to see that it wasn’t an office chair ad, but an actual picture of that amazing blanket…I don’t have words for the feeling bordering between relief, joy, and cognitive disassociation that I wasn’t looking at an office chair ad.
Please tell M that her work is gorgeous and moving, and might quite well be remembered long into the future.
Art doesn’t care, life doesn’t care
I don’t know if the blanket will be forgotten. Craft occupies a slightly different space than art. Sometimes I think that out of all the work stuff I’ve done and diplomas I got, the things I’ve created that will be remembered in 150 years will be the blankets I crocheted and quilted. They’ll probably end up in an antique shop someplace, and someone I have zero connection to will think they are boho and cute and buy them to throw on a couch. Those things will be all that is left of me in the end. Even now, pulling patterns off of vintage blankets is a decently popular niche hobby.
Roughly speaking, the period in which musicians could make money by selling recordings of their music started basically with Edison’s phonograph and ended with the Internet. Before that, some musicians would make money by selling sheet music. That era has also drawn to a close. I don’t think we should mourn these brief fads: instead we should rejoice on music going back to its roots, to people making music for their friends, and for sheer joy; playing in front of an audience and basking in the glow, maybe some tickets or a cut of profit from the bar. That seems like the fate of all other art too: we will love a painting because my amazing Aunt Bee painted it. I don’t think we should mourn the passing of “big art”, we should rejoice in its democratization and in improved tools that let more people express themselves in more delightful ways.
I feel you. But there is good news. The other day, I saw this very lovely Japanese film, “It’s a Summer Film” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Summer_Film). At first glance, it seems uncomplicated, but the ending, which talks about why we do art and what it means for “posterity,” makes it probably one of the best films I have seen this year.
Please see it and write what you think about it. I would love to hear your take.