I’m not doing art. I am doing life.

I’m not doing art. I am doing life.

What if we start seeing things from the point of view that a big part of what we are meant to do here is to figure out what we’re doing here? Certainly, it is the job of artists, if not all of us, to examine the world, try to make sense of it, and distill it into something a little more understandable.

I think, especially now, a lot of us are confused and don’t understand why the world is the way it is.

I recently talked to a friend who is approaching 60 – ten years older than me - who said that they hadn’t accomplished anything yet. My friend and I are similar in a lot of ways. This person, like I do, spends a lot of time trying to understand their own relationship to the world. I told my friend that their bit-by-bit increased understanding is a big accomplishment. I certainly feel like it is for me.

I think a lot of people in the arts feel the same way. People in the arts tend to keep an eye on their own perspective – knowingly or unknowingly – which in turn helps everyone else with theirs.

In the past, we were able to identify the experts who were good at helping with society’s perspective of the world. The experts we paid attention to – writers, filmmakers, painters, photographers, musicians, comics artists – changed every so often as what we understood about the world changed. Right now, everyone is presenting themselves as being expert in perspective and so the people who we should really be paying attention to; the makers with unique perspectives are getting lost in the shuffle and people who should be making things aren’t because they are being put off by the disingenuous nature of social media.

Things have changed in the arts; criticism and the world of agents has become a big muddle. We don’t know who the expert critics are because the way we get our news has changed so rapidly and so we also don’t know who the expert artists are. Newspapers and other publications used to employ critics; for the most part, they don’t anymore and many of those publications no longer exist. We as individuals can tell what is good and what isn’t – what we like - but sometimes being pointed in the right direction helps.

I’m not doing art; I am doing life. I have changed my own perspective of what I’m doing when I write, take photographs, make short videos. Social media gives everyone the opportunity to present their perspective, but sometimes that perspective is colored by how people want to be perceived rather than who that person really is. Previously – because of the timing of my finishing art school - my perspective of what I make and why I make it was seen through the lens of social media. It felt performative and gross. I didn’t like how that felt.

My own view has changed. It has become clear to me that I don’t want to be performative. I want to see understanding the world and explaining it as my job – not producing art – the explaining the world part. This isn’t bits and pieces - this is me as a whole - wanting to pour my being into loving the world’s nuances and idiosyncrasies and trying to understand them. I don’t want to perform for the world.  I want to do this because this is what I do.

I think I’m not alone in needing to resolve the very personal nature of creating art with the current default way of sharing it. The arts are a conversation. It’s hard to have a conversation with everyone in the world. Let’s start having the conversation with our selves and our own communities and see where that takes us.