What It Feels Like (Edition)*: We are the Age of Consumption and the Age without Thought:

If I say it is, therefore it is. In college I wrote a lot of poetry and creative nonfiction about how much I smoked, how little I valued marriage, how things fall apart, and how artists portrayed isolation in urban environments. Those were my themes. In college I smoked a lot, visited a lot of art openings and music gigs, babysat a couple munchkins on campus, and was always holding a cup of coffee. One of my trusted professors--who once called two of my other favorite professors into her office to brainstorm about my writing, who would whip up a fresh French press at my arrival--called me “a true artist” in the way I lived my life. To another professor that I sometimes had coffee with, not to me, obviously. A compliment to the extreme, I thought, a person that knows me and really gets me. Cogito ergo sum. Only: She think I’m an artist, therefore I am.

I used to believe it was a way of life. Art. Living artfully. Observing closely, pulling away from the mundane the most extravagant of details and backstories. Dabbling in paint, or charcoal, or clay, or the theatre, or guitar, or sewing. She who does is! I could justify my quiet and my solitude by living in this idea that I was built like those who inspired me. But a degree, a job, families, and laziness interrupt dreams. Then again, dreams are cut short by overreaching, insufficient talent, and our goddamn heads. If we don’t do, then we aren’t.

But if an artist posts a new piece to Facebook and gets zero likes, does the art make a sound (or a difference, or a meaning, or whatever)? Picasso, Vonnegut, Oscar Wilde and all sorts of infamous artists are quoted defending the importance and necessity of art to our souls. Quotations once absorbed into my character have become questions of their own. We recognize art for its beauty; we talk about what it portrays. Then we go and call it dark; we say art is emotive, that it must make us feel something to be art. Sometimes we simply make art an idea. It just is, even if it isn’t, we say. We’re entertained by the new and unclear. We’re bored by things of convention, even when done beautifully. Often, it seems, we separate art into two categories: what is controversial and what is appealing to the eye, yet we’d be scorned if we were to classify people into the same two categories: those that are pretty and those that cause trouble. Because, as everyone knows, even pretty things can stir up a storm.

In a world where half of you reading this probably have your own blog, where at least 75% of you have a Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to post your own statuses and computer-filtered photographs, and all of you have the ability of creating a blog or website or social media page to show off the work you could be doing, everyone has the ability to portray themselves as an artist. I’m having a hard time justifying, to myself, that I am a writer just because I post on this blog every so often. In fact, I’m having a hard time justifying that I am anything most days. In an ever expanding digital world we have the ability to consume whatever we want but we keep on wanting to be everything without doing anything. 




*to me