We Are Not The Things We Make

+++ title = “08” date = 2019 +++

We all create art, whether we admit to it or not. Perhaps your art is your fine art, or perhaps it’s your children, or perhaps it’s your cooking.

When we look at it this way, it’s easy to get offended when others don’t like or connect to our art. We get defensive, and we start to question our abilities as an artist.

There’s a simple solution, which is to write it on our hands that we are not our art. Yes, we might spend our time to creating an expressions of our inner world, but this is the same thing as hating a picture of a tree and somehow believing you also hate the tree itself.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter what other people think. We’re still great, fresh, thinking, creative, and agile. And the effect that our art has on people will be what it is, and that’s why we made it. Even if the effect is one of disgust or indifference.

When you really dig deep, it’s possible to realize that we don’t make things so that people will love them. No one has ever made anything that is truly universally loved. After all there, are even 1-star reviews for Goodnight Moon.

But we make things for people to see, hear, and dance to. And for people to kick to the curb if they want to.

It has nothing do with character or moral judgment. I do not hold my work accountable. If someone somewhere felt something as a result of the things I made, good or bad, I have done my job.