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Selfish Artists: Dynamics of A Peculiar Concept

April 15, 2024

All people are selfish, artists or not. This might sound like a hot take, but it’s actually trite: When all are something, nobody is. In other words, all people are selfish because that’s human nature – we are the center of the universe because that’s how we perceive everything – but the fact that there are degrees is what allows us to call someone selfish and someone else not.

Linguistic and metaphysical trickery aside, selfish artists are a peculiar concept because the nature of art itself (especially in connection with authorship) is as peculiar. By its nature, art isn’t quantifiable, whereas artists are humans with intense desire to quantify everything.

Do artists have social responsibilities? That’s a question we’ve wondered about. Selfish artists, as a concept, is somewhat relevant to that question, but not entirely. The topic boils down to the degree an artist respects the art, their work, and ultimately themselves.

selfish artists. image of a person with colorful paint — Here’s a little *meta-* take on selfish artists: The original image (public domain) was much more colorful, with high saturation. I assume the photographer became a bit too enamored with the vivid colors and cranked up the saturation. Before posting it, I slightly lowered the saturation to let the image “breathe”. Who’s selfish? The photographer for going all out and “disrespecting” the art, or I for essentially imposing my artistic will on someone else’s work?

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What Is Fiction? The Problem of Defining Reality

April 8, 2024

Literature

creativity, fiction, literature, reality, society, writing

I love deceptively simple questions. “What is fiction?” definitely counts because, on the surface, it appears childishly obvious. One might say “Fiction is writing stories that aren’t real”, or something of the sort. Probably you couldn’t even entirely disagree with that. And yet, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Obviously enough, if we want to talk about fiction and reality (aren’t they, after all, supposed to be antonyms?) there are special cases, too. “What is fiction?” seems to have a different answer if we offered as an example fantasy fiction, and yet a different one if we talked about, say, historical fiction. And what about memoirs? Not to mention the crazy notion (of yours truly) that all books are autobiographical.

The problem of comprehensively answering the question “What is fiction?” boils down to two main issues:

Who is the author of a work?
What is reality?

I told you, I love deceptively simple questions. “The author of a work is the person who wrote it, you dummy!” I hear someone telling me. The same person might even roll their eyes hearing me asking what is reality.

But, as you will see in this post, neither of these questions has a clear answer. And this complicates our attempt to answer “what is fiction?” as well. Though worry not, I’ll face the challenge!

“What is fiction?” is not a question that can be answered with recourse to whether it depicts reality or not, but whether it’s predicated on **affect**

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The Collapse of Criteria and the Prostitution of Art

March 4, 2024

Society

art, creativity, ignorance, literature, mediocrity, social masses, social media, society, writing

In an interview in 1991 (I will share the relevant excerpt translated/transcribed in this post), the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out a sobering fact: We live in an era characterized by the collapse of criteria and the prostitution of art.

That is to say, Castoriadis argued, we live in an era with no criteria by which to gauge art. As a result, art prostitutes itself and loses its true meaning. It becomes industrialized.

There are two important elements in this very short excerpt I will discuss in this post:

Castoriadis naturally spoke before the internet and – especially – social media. I wonder what he would think about them.
Importantly, Castoriadis argues that art should create its own criteria.

If art should create its own criteria, and we observe a collapse of criteria today, what does that tell us?

collapse of criteria. image of Acropolis — The Acropolis of Athens, Greece. Each era creates its own criteria. Parthenon still stands, 2500 years later

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