Why do artists practice art? It was after 20 years in the musical composition business that a family member asked me one day when I was going to find a job. I had no fixed income to speak of, and yet my hours were filled day in and day out with songwriting. It came across as being a very egotistical rebuke, as if they were asking "when are you going to become more like me", for they considered themselves to be the paragon of success.
But it was in that moment that I realized the truth about success and failure in their mind, as well as in the minds of all materialists. For I could write five hundred songs, that were played on the radio 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the next thousand years. I could paint fifty dozen portraits that hung in the Smithsonian and sold for a million dollars each. I could sculpt a mile-high statue that stood proudly long after civilization around it had crumbled and turned to dust. I could even write a novel that scholars and scribes studied and debated over until the end of time itself. And still, STILL, even after all of that, I would be called a failure in many people's eyes.
That reveals a profound shortcoming not in me, but in them. For such people are fundamentally incapable of measuring human worth in anything other than gold and silver. They are simply one more over-esteemed member of a society that does an extremely poor job of rewarding, or even recognizing, those who contribute to it. And that in the end may be civilization's undoing, because nothing that eats away at its own foundations has ever stood the test of time.
As for me, I will keep doing what I have been doing, until I either die of starvation or see something come of it. And those who see no real worth in my work, and who have tacitly admitted to seeing no worth in me as a human being either, will continue to discredit my accomplishments. It is my hope that it never dissuades nor disheartens me, for I practice art precisely because someone, somewhere, sometime long ago told me that I could not. To which, in defiant retribution, I have ever since replied: watch me...
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