

September 15, 2014: meaning and death

Art is at its most unbearable when it's still raw. No one has cooked, digested and made sense of it. Art historians, curators, critics, peers and audiences haven't consolidated it just yet. It lies there on the studio floor or where ever, and its maker looks at the work in both terror and hope. The maker knows that everything, such as the given moment, the hasty writings in a notebook, that work there, a brief conversation over drinks, a car ride, any output, can be made to convey historical sense. 

If you're lucky, someone will take your trifles more seriously than life. Or then your works are just left there on the floor dying a meaningless death.

You can give your work everything else but gravity. That's the one thing you would want for your works the most. Since without significance, they're just data. 

If you can afford to be creating, it usually means you're better off than most here. You work with and because of excess, either of your own making or as a result of other people's labor, or brute luck. 

Any sane person would feel the occasional sting of guilt under such conditions. But when gravity strikes, guilt dies. 

In the end, what kills the artist is the delay between those two elementary states.