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The True Nature of Art

June 27, 2022

art, artist, creativity, experience, imagination, society

Some months ago, I went to Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The purpose of the trip was to visit as many museums and art exhibitions as I could fit in the span of six hours – I managed to visit a couple of museums, four exhibitions, and the Helsinki Observatory. It was great fun, but I wouldn’t bother writing about it if it weren’t for one serendipitous realization, one related to the true nature of art, that can be summed up this way:

Art hides in the most unexpected places.
You need to be able to see art.

All this might sound a bit cryptic. Moreover, referring to “the true nature of art” makes me feel uncomfortable – who am I to define something so undefinable? For all purposes, this text is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, drawing on the way I experienced some things. It’s subjective; there’s nothing but subjectivity.

Still, whether you’re a creator of art (a writer, a painter, a musician, or even – why not? – a coder) or “just” a reader/viewer, this might reveal new horizons to the ways you understand the “true” nature of art.

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Stream of Consciousness Nonfiction: Can It Work?

December 20, 2021

Experiencing

creativity, experience, experiencing, experimental, writing

This will probably be one of the weirdest posts I’ve ever written, but if we don’t try new things how can we challenge ourselves? Without the courage to lose sight of the shore, how can we discover new oceans? This post on whether stream of consciousness nonfiction can work is an example-in-itself.

I decided to give myself a challenge: start writing a post and see how much I can write in the span of thirty minutes. Can stream of consciousness nonfiction work? What will it look like? Is it worth it? Will I stop making silly, self-evident questions and instead proceed with the post itself?

I’ll document my progress as I go along, because I feel this will be the most useful (to you) part of the entire experiment.

stream of consciousness nonfiction — *Whenever I don’t have time to think much about an image, I simply add a cat photo. Always works!*

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How Writing Perfectionism Kills Creativity

December 21, 2020

Writing

experience, perception, perfectionism, writing

I’m not really a perfectionist. I’m a jack of all trades and master of some, but I don’t care about perfection. In some sense, I consider it a part of the artistic process for a work to have imperfections – we’ll get back to this, it’s crucial. And so, writing perfectionism is something I reject.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I used to spend hours on a single paragraph; whole nights on trying to figure out – in vain – what the perfect chapter would look like.

But then years passed, life happened, and I became more experienced. I also became more skillful, to be sure, but realizing the harms of writing perfectionism is about experience, not skill.

In this post I’ll try to offer some of this experience and show you how writing perfectionism kills your creativity and harms your work. To be a perfectionist writer is to assign quantitative aspects to an inherently qualitative endeavor. Or, in plain English, a perfect answer can only exist for questions like “How much is 5+5?” and not for “Should my antagonist be more subtle?”

Writing as art involves affect, not perfection. In other words, it’s precisely imperfection that gives meaning, affect, and ultimately value to the work.

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