On art
Art is something that has existed since the beginning of the human race, first humans on earth would use pigments from fruits and stuff to draw stuff in the caves they used to call "home". The paintings were nothing but they things they saw everyday, res1, bulls, birds and other humans hunting animals so they could get food. We were not able to communicate like modern humans, we did not have settlements because we were nomads and we had to move from place to place to survive. But art was there, an extremely primitive art "style", but art nonetheless.
A few millions of years ago, ancient greeks used to have serious debates in middle of the city, they were called "philosophers", some said things worth learning (Aristotle and Diogenes) and others may be the product of the schizophrenia of Plato (Socrates). The thing is that they debated many things, ethics, science, metaphysics, logic and other things that helped to settle modern civilization.
I never studied in my life, I dedicated my school days to learn how to use emacs and write software in perl, I finished school because God is a great being. I was never given philosophy at school (which may have been the only subject I would be interested in). I've never studied philosophy in my life. To me philosophy is when you say something that hit so hard you have to think, so Imight as well score a triple in this blogpost.
One of the many interesting things the greeks left the world was its mythology, for this subject, we have 2 interesting characters:
- Dionysus: The God of wine
- Apollo: God of light, reason and music
Dionysus rituals were similar to an Eleusian mystery while Apollo's were made with perfection, formality and order.
In simple words, it basically means that Dionysus was a chaotic god while Apollo was the opposite.
I think that the only way for a human being to adopt new knowledge is to read or see many things and then come to a conclusion. the thesis antithesis synthesis shit everybody knows. you have to have 2 points of view and get to a conclusion from those 2. Which may be extremely different or somewhat similar.
One of the books I read a few pages of when I was in vacations was The birth of tragedy, by the mustache dude. Which said soamething similar to this. Basically said that art is the combination of both Dynisian and Apollonian ideas.
Thing is that this is starting to be a high school philosophy essay than a blog post. So what is art?
I'd define art as something you create and you're proud of. Something that you create for the mere purpose of creating it. Maybe art can also be defined as something you created and you think it's worth sharing with others. By this definition, a piece of software can be art. Some blogposts can be also labelled as art, youtube videos, music, etc.
Something I see important when creating art is self-expression, art is the best way to express how you feel and stuff. Saying "this 90s anime is literally me" is not a way to express yourself. Is just hiding yourself in something as a coping mechanism. When you create art, you're creating something from scratch, you can make it whatever your creativity can allow. You're free to use certain colors, or certain words, or a certain style to project yourself or a point however you wish, and, as i've been told self-expression keeps you sane.
So yeah, cool, right? it's good to create something and have a piece of your identity somehow inmortalized, well, creating art is extremely hard because you have two have 2 things which are hard to feel normally, creativity and motivation. And you have to have both superpowers at once.
Also the process of thinking is hard, one of the mechanism i've developed to think more creativetly is to walk in my room, so my blood circulates, i think that Mariano Delgado said something like that. Another source of inspiration is good. So I play music while writing, somehow it helps thinking.
So yeah, creating art is not easy, sometimes I have a good creativity streak and I can create a lot of things in not much of time, while in other days I want to stop existing because i'm unable to think something interesting to write about. Not that this bothers me. I have more things in life.
In another related subject, the fact that the modern world is surely a curious thing, is that artist can not normally live from their art, basically because mostly things that you really enjoy doing do not get a lot of money, this is nothing modern, this have been happening since at least the Renaissance, artists did not have money so they had to ask the Medici for money to make their art. And artists do that nowadays asking for money in Patreon or different platforms, simply because making art does not make money.
Is this really a problem? Sure it is, I'd love to make money writing blogposts and weed reviews and writing good, useful and simple software under the public domain. But as there is nothing that prints money from how productive (to your point of view), I had to get a normal job.
I would not consider this a problem. I do not really mind not getting paid for writing this blog or anything else I do under the public domain, because I did it because I wanted to do something, I made the things I've made because I was bored and had nothing better to do. It would be really good to get paid for doing this stuff, i'd maintain my software more reguraly because I have an incentive. But I think that the self-expression that having a blog provides is worth more than money.
Creating art is something pretty worth with, one of the reasons to life is the fact that you can be remembered, you can make stuff and make people react to is, you can make people happy with the stuff you create, you can make something laugh or think by simply doing something. And I think that helping others is also worth more than money.
So yeah, art does not make money and that is not an excuse for not creating art, everyone should be create art, but never expect a reward for it, art is something you do for love for art itself and mostly for yourself.
Do not fuck me res is a word it means "cow" ↩