Yeah, so I make stuff. The culture and timeframe in which I exist make me uncomfortable with the word “artist” since it has been bastardized, commoditized, and has more of a negative connotation than a positive one. Plus, if I introduced myself as “an artist” to people and they asked what kind, I know I would respond flatly, “Sandwich.”
There are characteristics that I and my “artist” friends share. Lazy, slacking, starving, flakey, and substance abusing are not among them. All of us have managed to create respectable, profitable careers in the creative fields, and most of us practice personal creativity in addition to our day jobs. In school at The Cleveland Institute of Art, pre-med students at the neighboring college would be out partying while we were still in studio until midnight. Don’t get me wrong, we had fun afterward, but we were possessed. We still are. None of us wear berets. Many of us are business people, good at math and science, socially and emotionally well adjusted, and otherwise non-“freaky” (although we tend to be far more comfortable with persons, cultures, and ideas outside the mainstream than most people).
That impulse to create isn’t something we cultivate to pass the time. We’re not scrapbookers or needlepointers. Every person should be encouraged to do something hands-on and creative. However, when the colloquial use of the word “artist” describes someone baking Fimo beads in their oven just as readily as it describes one of my contemporaries who is firing clay objects that are informed by all of art history, loaded with complicated layers of personal and cultural symbology, and will probably be part of a museum collection at some point in the future, we have an etymological error on our hands.
My contemporaries are some of the most brilliant, gifted, thoughtful, insightful, perceptive, sharp, and talented individuals I have ever met in any field or vocation. That’s the keyword. Vocation. Some careers are choices. Being an artist is not among them. It is something that you are. Finding a way to fold a career into that identity is a huge struggle and involves making compromises that involve the core of your reason for existing. Dramatic, I know, but both a blessing and curse – knowing exactly what you were meant to do but also knowing (or finding it out the hard way if you were naive like me) that you will have to suffer for it.
The universe is far too mysterious for me to try to define its reason for existence, but there is one constant I am sure of. I have been put here to observe, make connections between ideas, history, culture, and the natural world, and produce objects of aesthetic value and possible functional use. Benefiting individual’s daily lives with ease of use, increased functionality, and hopefully uplifting visual and tactile experience is my ultimate goal, joy, and purpose. Any social, political, or spiritual commentary or benefit garnered along the way is an extra value. Most artists are aware of this from a very young age. Some of us are blessed with talent. Others, myself included, make up for it with determination.
The last thing I am looking for in my struggle with the word “artist” is a separation from the rest of culture. My success as a being is dependent on those connections to cultures.
However, if the word “artist” were an exit on a highway, every time someone tried to get to an artist, they would be inundated with hordes of people making all sorts of crazy stuff. I am certain it would be an interesting destination, but the oversaturation of content would make it difficult to find those creating breathtaking works that affect culture and the human experience profoundly. We need access to those objects and experiences and not just in museums.
Maybe Modern and Postmodern Art are themselves responsible for the stripping of the reverence formerly associated with persons with the title “artist.” Not long ago in human history, individuals with an artistic bent would have been seen as “seers” or shamans. There was an inherent status and prestige associated with such a position, but not out of celebrity or political power. The reverence was because of the perceived connection between heaven and earth and the direct benefit to tribe and culture through the telling of history and stories.
Maybe the democratization of the word “artist” is for the better. Maybe it’s all just supposed to come out in the wash, and we inherently decide who our own personal Capital-“A”-Artists and shamans are. There isn’t anything that I say here or do in my life that is going to change the wild, wild west of language and bring about a new word or affect the current one. So I best get comfortable with it. This is difficult to do when so much of the Capital-“A”-Artworld is embroiled in elitism – further devaluing the word and the value of all of us having access to “artists” who can enrich our lives.
Art exists when there is something bigger than ourselves at stake when we make or experience a man-made object – a larger conversation that we are a part of. Folk artists are unaware of this dialogue while creating their work, but it does not demean the value of their work. Capital “C” craftspeople are those who make functional objects (or not-meant-to-be-used facsimiles of them) while being aware of that same larger conversation.