We’re all artists nowQuick. What’s your reaction to that sentence? This was the title of a September 2015 New York Times article that considered expanded definitions of and options for creativity and the increasingly participatory nature of culture (among other things).
But my immediate interest here is with the range of reactions to that premise: We’re all artists now. What is your immediate response? While the options run on a continuum, there are basically three principal positions. One is, well, of course, everyone is creative and in some sense each person is an artist. This is probably the egalitarian argument. The other extreme is that the very notion that everyone is an artist is preposterous and demeans the notion of artist. This is unquestionably an elitist argument. The third data point is on the broad spectrum in between those two extremes–ambivalence and the tiring awareness that both views have a point.
It will probably surprise, if not shock, some readers to know that I’m a bit nonplussed by the question. While it is absolutely true that there is creativity in everyone and we should encourage and support its development, there is also the question of what is meant by “an artist.” And, while I’m profoundly uncomfortable with the artcentric view that “true” artists are rare birds existing on another plane, I’m not altogether happy with my first thoughts about everyone being an artist. My background and training create what I’m realizing as I write this is an unconscious response that artists are somehow “different” in a way that precludes everyone being one. Ouch.
I guess the point of this is that one’s immediate response to the question provides some insight into a person’s most basic views about the arts, the community, and the relationship between the two. My own assignment here is to review what it is about my unexamined personal definition of “an artist” that gives me pause in this exercise. In the meantime, I’ll keep reminding myself that my work focuses on arts organizations and their sometimes profoundly troubling disconnection from their communities, not on artists and what they chose to do or not.
Engage!
Doug
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Clickbait headline ( the Times’). Everybody may have artistic potential, but not everyone exercises it, much less “artfully.” We now all ( some, actually) have tools for artistic production at our fingertips, and means to disseminate what we make — i think that was the articles’ point — but that’s been true for millennia (we are all storytellers, we are all singers, we are all drawers, if we want to be). The “elitism” you mention, Doug, has to do with quality judgements about someone’s productivity, and maybe their intentions, not whether they do anything creative; I mean, one can do something creatively yet have no artistic purpose nor the level of skill to have an effect. The article if I recall correctly had a core that deserved argument, but It wasn’t referenced in the glib headline.
No argument re: the article itself. It was, indeed, my visceral response to the headline itself rather than the article’s content that prompted the post. Thanks for weighing in. And for providing a bit of context that I did not.