So, I was watching After Story episode 12 yesterday, which has a pretty heavy significance for me, and I felt a bit of a blog post about Yoshino's backstory as it's presented here, in episode 12.
Yoshino nails the journey of pretty much creative person... ever. You start out just wanting to make cool stuff, and eventually realize that what you make effects other people in a pretty serious way. Unveiling yourself in front of people causes them to change, and usually for the better. I mean, how could that not happen? Even if you're showing something really horrible (like a horror movie, say) it still hits people right in the heart and can get them to change. Self-revelation is relational, it's just that in art you don't necessarily know that you're relating!
Of course, finding out that you've been relating to a whole bunch of people without knowing it is paralyzing. I mean, you've just been told that playing in your sandbox and having fun is changing people's lives or (in the case of my iconography) realizing that people can glean information about you that you didn't necessarily think was obvious... yeah, paralyzing. What people do with that information entirely defines the rest of your artistic career. You can either realize that you should still focus on what you love and the others will relate to you focusing on it, try to make things specifically for the people watching, and/or just shut down immediately.
Well, Yoshino arrived at the first option after doing the last two, which is probably the worst route to take. Yoshino didn't do the right thing, didn't realize that his stuff needed to stay essentially self-centered, or... is it really self-centered to not focus on the others who are looking in on your creativity? I mean, you're relating to things that you like, you're essentially relating to God and letting people watch. Maybe that's why art is so beautiful. You're watching someone attempt to reach out into the black and get rewarded for it.
Hhhhhm... this requires a follow-up post. I'll get to that later.
Great thoughts! I don't think it's self-centered at all, either. You don't make art to show off your superior vision; artists who do that fall into an incredibly pretentious trap. Well, either pretentious or utterly incomprehensible. "You're just not me enough to understand it! Nobody understands me!"
ReplyDeleteArt consists of finding something real, and then using your talents to show that same reality to someone else. Your passion is not to show off your own abilities, it's a passion for the power of realities, which leads you to want to share your discoveries with the world.