Do you often feel misunderstood? Art can be used to express things that can’t be expressed in any other way.
Its an attempt to express something you can’t express any other way.
Keyword ATTEMPT- as you may still fail to express whatever it is you are trying to express to other people BUT there is a feeling of catharsis in just doing it- and a GREAT feeling in that experiencing this art you have created expressing the thing to yourself- hence the cathartic feeling.
In just completing a thing that is an attempt to express the thing/s you cannot express any other way does great things for your inner self.
Are you trying to express something without using art that is not getting through?
You’ve tried using words, pantomime, yelling?, screaming?, coloring your hair?, wearing a shirt with words on it?, tattoo’s maybe- but none of it works.
When all else fails art is there to listen to you and allow you to attempt to express whatever it is you want to express- art always listens and does its best to try and help you express these things to humans-
Now though- here’s where most everyone fucks up with this- they attach “success” or “failure” to this art- they attach “good” or “bad” to it- they attach its ability or inability to make money- they attach “popular” or “unpopular” to it- doing all these things erases any of the benefits you get from your attempt at self expression.
If your true self expression through art becomes “successful”, is deemed “good”, becomes “popular” and/or becomes a monetary success must be amazing for the tiny number of people that get to experience that- I wouldn’t know as I am not one of them.
So many artists have their art/self expression tool become degraded, dulled and ultimately broken through attaching these judgements to it- now yes most all of us need to “make a living”…
I think as an artist- for most of us we need to make a choice- If our art has not made us “successful” in a critical or monetary sense and is a tool of self expression that we value and we don’t want to see it become broken because we need it to live as a functioning human being…
Stop trying to force it to become something it is not- choose/learn/adapt to do something else for money and leave your art to be as it is in a pure form-
Sure, you probably won’t have much time to work on it at first because of your “real job” but when you do you’ll be ecstatic as you can allow it to be pure/whatever the fuck it wants to be without applying all this judgement whether it will be successful/whether “people will like it” etc
THIS is a great feeling.
I’m going to cut this short but think about all the people out there- “successful” people- shelling out millions and millions of dollars for therapy sessions with a therapist, think about all the hours talking to these therapists, think about all the medications they take in the process that make them so sick and toxic and cause all these other weird side effects they need other meds to counteract ad infinitum.
If you have your art today and you can get this self expression feeling where you don’t need to see a therapist or take meds you’re much “richer” than all the rich people that have to see these therapists and take the meds so don’t be so quick to write off or throw away your creative self expression however it is you do it- its VERY valuable- I would say it is INVALUABLE.
NOW a side note about “AI art” like the images in this article I generated using my own custom stable diffusion model.
AI art expresses nothing when you generate it. Its purely a commercial thing- there’s no self expression, there’s no spirit other than tiny mismatched fragments from the artists intent that created the training data.
When I generate ai art trained on my art I feel nothing other than “huh, that looks cool” or hideous or weird or whatever- I don’t feel any sort of self expression other than “wow what a cool trick”
I don’t feel any spiritual connection to it- it means nothing to me.
I know there’s a lot of arguments about how “artists aren’t needed anymore” as ai “art” tools take off- in a purely COMMERCIAL sense this makes sense %100- when its just about MONEY this makes sense. Its faster/cheaper/more powerful etc than hiring a human artist.
BUT from a self expression, spiritual sense- ai art tools do nothing and are nothing.
NOW thats not to say they can’t be useful to an artist holding on to their sense of self expression and spirit.
Perfect scenario- you do your pure NON-COMMERCIAL art for you without giving a fuck about popularity or money.
BUT YOU ALSO create ai models using your art as training data- then you create a custom LLM(Custom GPT trained with your data) model to act as commercial artist(Custom stable diffusion model trained with your art etc) you in which the outside world can interact with and pay this ai “you” for your creative services.
So perfect scenario- real NON COMMERCIAL you is wherever the fuck you wanna be in the world living your best life making your art while COMMERICAL “ai” you is working as multiple instances 24/7 making you money doing shit you don’t want to do for clients you don’t give a fuck about.