Art for Art’s Sake
Greetings, Programs! I apologize for the delay since my last post, as happens in life I experienced quite a few curve balls in a short period of time that made me rethink quite a bit about my present situation and future endeavors. In short, I learned the hard way that I had tethered too much of my identity to my employment and started to learn how to stand on my own again. (As an aside - if you know of any software or design-related jobs whatsoever, please do let me know!) There are good days and bad days when one is unemployed, as there always are, but the silver lining of this experience has been that I have been afforded the chance to experiment with different forms of creativity and storytelling in unique ways. I have written and rewritten this third blog post several times over the past few months, but frankly it took the sum of my many good days and bad days in the time since my last post for me to realize what it is that I truly wanted to say and wanted others to know. Thus, in the spirit of my last post on motivation for personal projects, I present my topic for today’s blog post: how to find the will to be creative in the storms of life.
Throughout these past several months as I have been searching for jobs, inevitably there have been days where I have been hyper-motivated to start new passion projects or continue work on existing ones, and likewise there have been days where I have felt immensely defeated and like no amount of effort on my part will ever be worthwhile. Being motivated on the good days is easy, but on the days where getting out of bed is a win in itself I started to ask myself what the point was of any sort of passion projects. Why should I spend so much time recording and editing YouTube videos if no one watches them or cares about them? Why should I write short stories if no one reads them and no one wants to publish them? Why should I work on video games if no one will play them? These are the types of thoughts that plagued me for months, and still do on the occasional off-day. But I write my response to those questions today as a declaration to the world and to myself about the truth that I have realized: the point of the creation of art is the art itself.
This may seem like a weak revelation. The words “Art for Art’s Sake” are everywhere in our world; as just one example, the phrase translated to Latin - “Ars Gratia Artis” - is the tagline of the entertainment company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, better known as MGM. With giant corporations such as these displaying the words on billboards and before movies, it may seem obvious that the point of art is the art itself. Despite seeing and hearing this message for so many years, it wasn’t until I really wrestled with the act of creation of art over the past several months that I truly understood it.
The phrase in itself suggests a zero-sum game of sorts, and that is exactly what has been such a profound revelation to me in the midst of this stormy season of life. The point of writing a short story over the span of weeks and months is not promised fame or fortune (though I wouldn’t complain with the arrival of either…), but rather the very act of creation itself. One writes a short story for the act of writing words on a page and expressing one’s self along the way. The journey is the destination in a very real sense. But what is the point of expressing one’s self if there is no “other” person to perceive it? This is the question and the answer that led to my ascension as I began to understand: Art for Art’s Sake.
Creating art of any form is an entirely personal affair that results, if nothing else, in the satisfaction of the creator. Through writing a short story, one strings together enough words to create a complete and coherent beginning, middle, and end, and can look at the resulting entity in pride. Through creating a film, one organizes enough shots in a specific order to create a complete entity that can be viewed over and over again in its entirety. Through painting an image, one can layer enough brushstrokes to fill however much surface area of a canvas to fully realize one’s own vision, and after doing so one can gaze upon the resulting art and appreciate the destination as well as each brushstroke or each step of the journey that led to it. The creation of any form of art is self-sufficient in that it results in art being made. The point of creating anything is the very act of creating and finishing something.
This realization reframed how I view passion projects and how I view the time I spend during each day. As someone who strives to be creative and to be a storyteller through writing, designing, and programming, the self-sufficiency of the act of creation has been what has kept me going over these past few months. With this realization, the days where I struggle to have any willpower to work on passion projects in my free time are now entirely revitalized as my dedication is reignited. Even when no one else knows what I am working on, I am improving my craft with each little bit of progress; I am expressing myself and I am learning more about my voice, day by day, keystroke by keystroke.
The other point I was so stuck on for so long was the idea that the process is rendered wasted time if there is no “sufficient” audience to justify it at the end of the process, no “other” to appreciate the hard work that led to the end result. If I spend years working on a game in my free time and no one plays it, was it all wasted time? Why should I write blog posts if no one reads them? (I know you are enjoying every word, dear reader, but I digress…) If I spend hours and hours recording and editing a YouTube video and no one watches it, what was the point? The point was the process in itself, the process of making something to be able to say you have made it. And to that end, I suppose it can be said the the “other” is the same as the creator, and that any others beyond that aren’t necessary. I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and one of the arguments that really struck me was the idea that getting “amped up” is not enough to accomplish one’s goals, and instead one must continue to find ways to show up even when bored or unmotivated. The idea behind “Art for Art’s Sake” is what has largely kept me showing up over these past few months.
From what I’ve learned over the years, an audience often will come at some point or another, even if not in the way you initially envision it. I wrote an article several years ago for Medium (my Medium account stemmed from my being fed up with not having creative outlets for my writings, but that is a post for another time) about the idea behind the phrase “Life is a Circle”, and no one read or opened it until I started getting daily emails over the past month or two with daily viewership statistics. An audience for the article just appeared one day, even if I still fail to comprehend how or why. Some of my recent YouTube videos have started getting comments from random people who are not subscribers (yet…). Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, which I contributed to, is still being talked about at lengths online even after its closure, and regardless of what is being said the fact that an audience exists after all is said and done is the takeaway. Any audience is good, but the lack of an audience at any point in time is still enough to justify creating in the first place. After all, how can an audience find a work of art if it was never created in the first place?
Of course, making a living out of making art adds a monetary element to this phrase. The creations of an artist are enough in themselves, but ultimately enough people must interact with a creation to justify the production of another creation. A film must sell well enough at the box office for a studio to fund the next film, and likewise a game must sell enough copies for the development company to have enough monetary resources to create another game. But removing money from the equation (at least conceptually, since that is all we can practically do) the driving factors behind “Art for Art’s Sake” are the same. Art does not need money before it or after it to be considered art, for what makes it art is the journey that led to the final masterpiece. Once again, the creation of art is the very point of art. The eventual reception of the art is irrelevant, for nothing can be judged if it is not created in the first place. Thus, we should create art for the sake of creating it - nothing more, and nothing less. QED.
And on that note, I will be writing blog posts more frequently from now on, and I may even begin lifting the curtain on what I have been working on throughout the past few months... Stay tuned and have a wonderful week.
- James