An Artist and His Work

Something I’ve been thinking about lately. A work does not belong to it’s author. I alluded to this concept in my review of Sometimes a Great Notion. And perhaps when I wrote that “songs need rust” and I discuss a song as separate and apart from me or its creator. I thought about it again when I watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity and I thought about it when I was reading about Derek Sivers talking about ‘the mirror’.

Derek wrote that:

It was important to me to always remember that what matters is what I get out of their work, not the person that made it.

I agree with that. It’s why I didn’t and don’t really care if Ken Kesey was a terrible painter or if I didn’t agree with some of the choices he’s made about the counter-culture movement. It’s why I don’t care whether I’d like Thom Yorke. I do think about whether I’d like Thom Yorke but I suspect that we might not get along.

But none of that matters.

And although it does matter for intellectual property law and for reasons relating to making money and incentives. It doesn’t matter from the perspective of art. At least it doesn’t for me. Here’s what I wrote in an email to Derek:

I mean that I sort of think that, in a spiritual sense or in an artistic sense, that once the work is created it belongs to the world rather than to the creator. Put another way, James Brown’s music has to do with James Brown but not at its essence. At its essence it is a different thing entirely and, appropriately, belongs to you as much as him.

Once a thing is created, it no longer, truly, belongs to the person that created it. And, in fact, although I talk about the inspiration behind the creation of certain songs and I think about what led me to fit the pieces together in a certain way, I don’t really feel that much affinity for them. Once they’re out into the world, they feel like strangers, in some sense. Although it’s natural to want to celebrate the author, I find it unhelpful. And besides finding it unhelpful, I find it disingenuous, perhaps because of the way that I find songs or things I’ve done in the past to be so separate from me.

That’s not to say that I don’t take pride from my accomplishments. I do. I like to point to them and feel chuffed and all of that. There’s a part of me that wants that celebration and that attention. Wants your mind to find itself back to me and the things I’ve done.

But, in my heart, I recognize that that’s my ego talking. And deep down inside, my sense is that art and things, in a spiritual way maybe, belong as much or more to the audience as to the creator of them. Once they’re out of me, once they’ve been harnessed and channeled, I really don’t have that much to do with them. It seems especially true with recorded music where people may listen to something in their own space and their own way in a manner that has literally nothing to do with the artist that created the work. And the music reaches those people in a way that has nothing to do with the audience.

So in that sense, in a way, the most actualized realized expression of art is live performance. Because it is a moment where everyone shares in the experience equally and the artist creates those moments in real time. Where the work is the artist. Otherwise, it seems to me like they have not so much to do with each other.

It’s the reason I try (although it’s just an attempt, this idea sometimes seems true more than it feels true) to not worry at all about the politics or the life choices of artists. Regardless of his politics, Sean Penn is a great actor and an uneven but interesting director. So if he wants to hang with Chavez, that’s fine. I’ll choose to dislike Sean Penn the person and see if I can separate him from Sean Penn’s creations as an actor.

What are the implications of the fact that a work is separate and apart from its author? Here are two:

All art is spiritually communal and shared by both the audience and the artist alike. Art literally does not belong to anyone.
Because we cannot lay claim to a work once created, we are almost mandated to explore a deeper humility about art. Artists channel creativity but do not create it.

The practical implication for me personally is that I find that I have trouble identifying with things I’ve done in the past as much as I identify with ideas that are gestating in my brain currently and which haven’t yet been done. As any songwriter can tell you, it’s all about the new shit.

An Artist and His Work

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