Make Shitty Art.
english transalted version
In recent months, I have voluntarily chosen to engage in two phases of life: active living and equally active rest. Never before have I consciously put myself in situations with the purpose of having to actively engage with what I am experiencing in my mind, in complete tranquility.
In previous years, I spent my time experiencing and avoiding my own thoughts about these things. I only knew peace when exhaustion and illness forced me into a kind of stagnation. (Or rather, when I put myself into it).
This year, my new year’s resolution was to live more actively. To perceive things more consciously, take risks more realistically, and make the most of every moment that offers me a better, healthier life with interesting people as my friends and intriguing professions that will help me advance. That was only the first part of my resolution; the second and much more difficult part was to allow myself peace and quiet and breaks when I needed them. To be honest, I think I only started doing that recently.
Resting and working – they go hand in hand.
There are phases in life when so many things happen at once that you don’t have time to reflect on everything that has happened. That would be too exhausting, too demanding, simply too much.
But at the end of the day, sooner or later there always comes a second phase, the quiet one, in which, if you don’t give yourself the time, you are forced to deal with what has happened.
I will have successfully “completed” my resolution when I am no longer lying in bed completely ill or depressed, asking myself, “How did it come to this?” The goal is to incorporate breaks and creativity into everyday life, and even if there are phases in which you are more surviving than experiencing, granting yourself some grace after a hard period to acknowledge what has happened is necessary.
Writing, reading, and learning are all things I must earn. At least that’s what I tell myself so that I don’t have to confront my perfectionism and possible failure or “bad art” (how paradoxical—there is no such thing as bad art, that’s the liberating thing about it).
I can’t say I’ve been in a phase of “resting,” but rather in a creative block, which I now want to slowly resolve. So much has happened in recent months that I’ve hardly had the time, let alone the energy, to sit down for a moment and write an essay. To be honest, with every day that I procrastinated, I developed a fear that whispered to me that I could no longer write. According to the voice in my head, everything would be ridiculously bad anyway.
Now, after this hectic phase of experiences, I want to set aside quiet moments in my day to put my thoughts down on paper.
In recent months, I have had a wide variety of life experiences, met all kinds of people, and heard the craziest stories—every single one of them deserves to be written down. Of course, I judge myself much more harshly than anyone else ever could, and that makes it much easier for me to simply not give myself the break and peace I need in order to make art and write. If I simply work myself to exhaustion, - a state of total fatigue where I no longer have the energy to write, then I can’t produce anything bad.
That’s more or less what I tell myself subconsciously.
But that’s exactly what’s so wonderful about writing and being creative: the process of total freedom, until you see in black and white what has been on your mind and affecting you all along.
“Make shitty art.”
The quality of your art and what you put out there will always be judged, most of all by yourself.
No criticism hits harder than your own totally subjective, biased, mean one.
Who interprets your art and who influences it?
Do you allow yourself to express it? How strong is your urge to show who you are and how long can you suppress it until you burn yourself out or, in the better of the two cases, fall into a creative hole where you don’t care what others think and just do it. You act!
Just do.
Create.
Make shitty art. Make any art. But don’t do nothing.
Don’t do it for others. Do it for yourself.
Your art doesn’t have to be lucrative to be considered art or perceived as such.
It doesn’t have to be profitable or perfect. It just has to exist. It just has to be. So do it, take action, and kill perfectionism. (As if it was that easy.)
Art isn’t worth it if you can’t make money off of it.
That is exactly how I have perceived it for the longest time now. I saw writing as something that I might be able to utilize to create an income stream. A second, maybe third income. Money. And how is that supposed to sell if, in my very biased opinion, it is not valuable or good enough?
Why should I connect what my soul craves most with a currency, a social construct with which we try to make immaterial things material? Why should this concept, which has nothing to do with me, prevent me from doing what defines me and brings me fulfillment?
I know I’m not the only one. More and more people on social media are striving for imperfection and realizing that a hobby shouldn’t always be monetized.
The end result of art is not a check at the end of the day, but that it exists.
The pure existence that we try to assign value to in terms of money. How is that possible?
Ultimately, it only prevents you from doing what you really want to do, because you become dependent on social approval and thus the money you get or don’t get from it.
Shitty art is art. Of course, the quality and the heart and soul as well as personality with which you express yourself count.
That’s all that art is, and if you let yourself be guided authentically by this inner urge, you can bring this energy into our world, realize it, and express it.
In my eyes, art (and for me, writing) is exactly that: expressing the inner energy of the soul and what it longs for most. No one has the right to judge someone else’s form of expression in such a way that it prevents them from drawing this energy out of themselves. After all, art is an expression of the soul. And how should this fit into a consumer-oriented society that can no longer express its appreciation with feelings, praise, and recognition, but only with money?
Why do we give money, something that doesn’t really exist, more meaning than what it can do to another soul? It’s about how the energy of our soul, once we bring it into reality, can touch another person—even if we never knew them and perhaps didn’t even exist at the same time.
The words of an author who died long ago can fundamentally change your thinking. His soul can speak to yours in his books. Paintings by artists, architecture in Rome, a traditional dish from Asia—all these are things that originated from a creative soul to be heard by another. The perceptive soul must “only” allow itself to engage in challenging its own thinking.
There is nothing more personal and more liberating than this process.
It is exactly what a creative soul strives for.
During these chaotic months, I have learned that nothing will make me happy in the future if I don’t express myself in some way and give myself the encouragement and self-confidence to be seen and heard. My soul longs for little breaks, experiencing new things, learning from strangers, and “expressing itself.”
The perception and confirmation of another person only influences this process of creation to a limited extent, and even then, only minimally. How another soul perceives my work does not depend on my mode of expression. (Provided you don’t intend to harm anyone!) Everyone will react differently to your art, and that’s the beauty of it. It should spark discourse and conversation. Everyone can and should have an opinion and be able to relate art to their own experiences.
It is not up to the artist how their art is perceived, as long as it exists, because every soul will be triggered differently, and that is exactly how it should be. The saddest thing is that many people are no longer able to go through this act of change for external reasons. They follow the most familiar, loudest voice, or they don’t bother with things that have nothing to do with themselves to begin with.
In summary, it is important to remember that one must go through and allow an inner process in order to create art, but also to perceive it. It is up to you whether you allow this or not, and in both cases (creating and perceiving), you must consciously decide that what you perceive could fundamentally change you. The most important thing is to allow yourself the freedom to create, regardless of status, money, and recognition. All these things have nothing to do with the inner process of creation and exist for purely material reasons through made up constructs, rules, and institutions that we humans have created because we have forgotten how to express and accept appreciation in other ways.
Hi hii,
long time no see.
I posted the german original prior to this, i want to keep up writing in both languages (since im waaay better in german of course but still want to write in english as well!)
I hope you like this one!!
xoxo, Lea
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You're the first creator I ever subscribed to on Substack, and it’s honestly so beautiful to see how much you’ve grown into your writing. This post especially shows just how much it means to you and how much you have to share :)