67. Making art is easy. Expressing yourself is not.
A clapback for the "Psh, I could do that!" crowd
You know what I will no longer have time for in 2025? When people experience art—most often non-literal visual art, but sometimes a performance or a poem, etc.—and they say, dismissively, “Psh. I could do that!” Or worse: “My kid could do that!”
First of all? I’ve played Pictionary with you before, my dude. You cannot make a straight line to save your life, so check yourself.
But secondly, and more importantly, I say to these people…sure. They could do that! They could take a canvas and paint a bunch of squares on it, or only paint one solid color, or splatter paint everywhere, or make found poetry, or sit in the same chair in a famous museum all damn day. They are absolutely 100% capable of those things, right?
They could indeed pretty easily take a few oil and acrylic paint classes to learn how to properly prepare a canvas and blend colors and recreate Mark Rothko’s or Piet Mondrian’s work. They, too, could consciously collect scraps of text from their daily lives and publish it as poetry. They could also, say, spray paint a garage door with the date every day for a year and call it performance art. Sure!
But the value of art and creativity is not that some people are physically capable of it and others are not. (That attitude is so telling, isn’t it? It’s almost like our Western capitalist mindset needs us to believe that the only art worth making and consuming and celebrating is art with an almost insurmountable technical skill barrier, because god forbid people invest their own time and energy in amateur creative self-expression, which does less for major corporations than people buying their catharsis, self-soothing, and entertainment does! But I digress…)
Again, the value of art is not in whether someone else could or couldn’t create a particular piece of it. So someone saying “I could do that!” is beside the point.
Because the point is that they don’t.
They could, but they don’t. They don’t want to. They don’t need to. They could, but there wouldn’t be an idea behind the creation, and their attempts to copy would not account for the commentary the work is making nor the context in which it was created, which imbues it with additional meaning. So while yes, they could paint Rothko’s gradients, or Pollack’s splatters, or Rauschenberg’s solid white canvas, or recreate Abramović’s feats of endurance, they would be saying nothing.
What separates artists and creatives from the “I could do that!” folks is not the painting or the poem or the performance, but rather having something to fucking say!
Why am I on this rant? Because—shocker—the rise of generative AI has led to a democratization of creation that I fear is wildly outpacing the democratization of self-expression. It’s fuel for the “I could do that!” fire. Because now anyone can generate digital images, can generate song lyrics, can generate book-length narratives. All while expressing basically ::fart noise:: other than, “Look: Now this exists.” (And then, let’s be honest, usually trying to use whatever it is to make money.)
I want to stop and take a big breath here and say that I wholeheartedly support the democratization of self-expression! (As evidence, please see: Every other newsletter post on this Substack.) Everybody is creative. Everybody has something to say. But our social norms and patriarchal ideas of value have ensured that fluent self-expression remains in the realm of those technically and traditionally skilled enough to become widely lauded and funded and/or those brave enough to withstand public and private ridicule.
What a shame that self-expression leaves us vulnerable to the judgments of others rather than the celebration of others. Others love to decide that something isn’t “good enough” or “relatable enough”—but “good enough” for what? “Relatable enough” to whom? What we really mean when passing these judgments is: “This isn’t commercial enough.” Because we have been accustomed to conceive of no motivation other than profit—or fame, which is also profit—and attribute no value other than a monetary one. If you’re a musician but you have a day job, you’re a failed musician. If you make quilts but just give them away to friends and family, you have a cute hobby, not a body of work as a textile artist.
But it’s a long walk between “This isn’t commercial” and “This isn’t worth expressing.” We’ve just conflated them.
So what’s the point in all this? (Other than me getting it off my chest—thanks for listening!) I’ll go back to something that Kevan wrote in last week’s newsletter:
“Urgency matters a lot less than you might think. As much as it might pain me to acknowledge, far fewer people than I think are waiting on pins and needles for me to launch something. Maybe no one is waiting!”
“No one is waiting,” really hit me hard. Because it’s true. Being an artist/creator/maker of any kind is to exist in a noisy, oversaturated world where, with very few exceptions, no one is waiting for the thing you’re creating. And all the hollow, soulless, AI-zombie creations, all the stuff that is just for commercial purposes, makes it even more crowded and competitive these days. It’s truly disheartening. But just like how what makes someone an artist is the impulse and not the creation itself, another dividing line is that no one is waiting and you do it anyway. Because you have something to say, and you’ve somehow, blessedly, against all odds, come to the conclusion that it’s worth saying without guarantee of recognition.
If people were waiting for something specific, they would go out to get it, or someone would figure out a way to quickly give it to them, probably cheaply and poorly. But the things that are worth making are the things that people don't even know they want or need. And the discovery that something fills an unknown want or need is what's most meaningful, delightful, compelling, and touching: "I didn't know I needed this, but here it is. I learned something about myself. I am more than I knew."
“I could do that”—yeah, you could. And maybe you should. You might discover you actually have something to say.
/rant
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