The Value of Bad Art
- By s1ree1
In starting a new photography blog there are several challenges, like just making the actual posts. Beyond that, making good posts also seems fairly important. But they cant all be good posts, can they? Why dont bands just write good songs? Well, it turns out they’re actually all good songs. We just like some of them more than others. How can that be?
West 34th St
When a group of musicians makes new music, they have a certain aesthetic, a standard way of creating which is often evolving. After writing a song, it bounces around the tour bus or the studio or the rehearsal space for a while. The people who made it have to keep coming back to it for it to ever make it to you; a lot of creations just die shortly after birth or in early childhood. Some of those stillborn creations might have been something you would like, but the people creating it have to believe in it first. All the songs they wrote that you end up hearing are already good – to them.
City Hall
Successful creators are harsh, evil parents who constantly crush their creations or box them up for private reflection like some horror at a medical college. Some creations may resist this crushing process and you take a small part and use it to rebuild around. But the urge to kill must be merciless, because we are always trying to escape our own mediocrity and persue our best versions of ourselves and our creations. If we arent constantly, silently murdering our beloved children in the darkness of the night, we’re doing it wrong.
You can see how the process of becoming an artist is simply not a natural one.
Lower Broadway
Our bad creations arent bad the same way bad kids arent bad, maybe a little misguided or out of focus, they mean well, most of the time. They have that shining light in their eyes and are ready for the world like all our other creations. But then we keep examining them, and examining ourselves, and comparing the distance between the two. We keep creating. They have brothers and sisters, their kids have kids. Then one day that likeable creation doesnt quite call to you the same way. Compared to those around it, it looks downright dowdy. That day might be the day after it was made or 3 decades later when you’re forced to play a song you wrote in high school so you can pay your mortgage. Nobody said being an artist would be easy.