Welcome to Art Life Balance, a blog about art, life, and some other third thing. Learn more on my about page and, if you haven’t already, subscribe to receive my posts via email (and to make my day).
I didn’t bother crafting any specific New Year’s resolutions this year. I’m never sure if the practice helps more than it hurts when, months later, I look back on a list of mostly discarded “should” statements.
I have, however, become a fan of the New Year’s mantra. Informally, Jeremy and I came up with one last year that we had many occasions to repeat. It’s stupidly simple and sounds like something a robot would say: More good input. Less bad input.
The idea is that our “system” becomes overloaded when it’s filled with “bad input” — social engagements that feel more like obligations, projects we’d rather not take on, bit-parts in other people’s dramas that need not involve us — and, before setting other goals, we need to clear up space.
I’m happy to report that we actually lived out this mantra in 2023. That’s, in part, thanks to the simplicity of the words themselves. When we felt pulled in multiple directions at once, More good input. Less bad input was a touchstone that transported us out of the muddle of daily minutiae and into the clarity of a guiding rule. Within this framework, choices subject to a million variables suddenly became much simpler.
It’s 2024 now (what!?), and suddenly a fresh new mantra is on repeat in my head, rattling around in the space once reserved for unrealistic resolutions.
Without further ado, here it is:
Just look around and tell people what you see.
The line is grafted from a Walter Kirn tweet:
That’s right, 2024 will be my dissident era.
Just kidding. Sort of.
I won’t claim to know what it means to be a dissident. (Something tells me it involves wearing all black? Smoking cigarettes behind a dumpster? Graffitiing the anarchy symbol on government buildings?) But I do think this describes what it means to be an artist.
The idea is kind of a revelation for me.
I’ve never been very comfortable describing myself as an artist. Who can say what the term really means? It’s associated with people from Banksy to Beethoven, with activities from writing epic poems to designing OCs for your Harry Potter fanfic. The kinds of people who don the label are just as wide-ranging, from established professionals to hobbyists to individuals who believe they possess a sort of romantic artsy flair but have never picked up a paintbrush or messed around in Garage Band.
At the same time, I can thank the term’s ambiguity for convincing me that it fits me, too — even if loosely. After all, I like drawing pictures and writing essays. And I have an “artistic” sensibility … whatever that means.
Just look around and tell people what you see.
Ah. That’s what that means.
It dawned on me recently that “artist” isn’t a label reserved for people who have mastered a particular skill or medium, who make money from their creative work, or who espouse a particular message. The label belongs anyone willing to look closely at, listen intently to, and truly learn from their experiences and surroundings. And that’s a pretty select group, if you ask me.
Far simpler than doing these things is living life on cruise-control, mindlessly doing what you’ve always done because you’ve always done it — something we all do sometimes and with mixed results. It’s the job of the artist to make time to step out of this attitude of complacency, to observe, to record (in whatever way we know how), and to share what we discover with others.
I will continue to call myself an artist, not because I always do these things, but because I aspire to do them more often. The mantra, I believe, will keep me on the right track.
I looked around a nearby town. Here’s what I saw:
Today’s question:
How do you define “artist”?
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