Why do we make art when it’s never as good as we wanted it to be?
By Connor Salter, Postgraduate Student
Why do we make art when it’s never as good as we wanted it to be? A friend who makes public art for a living in Chicago asked me this question as we had lunch in Northpoint Café. I work more with words than visual art, but I understood her point. Rarely, if ever, does a creative project look exactly at completion like it did in the original conception. In that respect, making art is a constant challenge to handle the failure. We chatted about several possibilities, but I’m not sure I gave her an answer that she found satisfying. A few days later, I was going through my files and found something I had written too long ago to remember, probably when I first aspired to write poetry. It was not nearly as good as I remembered. But it had an interesting image. Here is my rewritten, expanded version of that reflection:
In real life, creativity is getting up on a dry Tuesday morning and approaching my computer desk covered in cables and crumpled notes. I approach it the same way I do every morning, which makes my approach about as gentle as my biweekly walk to take the garbage bins out.
Yet every time I close the computer screen and get up to find something better to do, the ideas are in my mind. That magician’s box keeps on teasing me until I get to work. After I’ve removed the idea from its original location, some of the magic will be gone. When I have clarified it, polished it, and released it into the world, I will be a little dissatisfied. But I always feel more satisfied with a finished project than with a project I leave locked up in my head. It may be that all finished art feels like failure. But not engaging in art to start with is assured failure. |