Why do we make art when it’s never as good as we wanted it to be?

Caroline McWilliams
Tuesday 14 January 2025
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:

I want to see creativity as a magician’s box. I approach it gently. Tap its opaque lid. I squint at its nearly see-through walls to see what I might use today. Story worlds the size of neutron stars. Characters forming and reforming like quicksilver. I rub my hands, lift the lid, and pull something from the magician’s box. I turn to the audience, displaying the latest marvel. Bow for applause.

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.

I feel annoyed when the laptop screen takes its time switching from void black to fluorescent white to screensaver mode. Then I gaze at my dozen, thousand, million, half-finished projects in their appropriately labeled folders. By now I am mostly awake, and I register two things. First, I’m not sure which story or character to tinker with next. Second, even when I finish my tinkering, the wonder I felt when making the project in my head won’t match the reality once the project is finished. It all feels magical in the planning stage. Sometimes it still feels magical halfway through the first draft. It feels far less magical several drafts later.

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.


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