Ten Thousand Things

(This was  meant to be a guide to a longer article I am writing. I posted it inadvertently. But since it is getting a lot of reaction, I will keep it here. My article for next  Sunday will be this same topic but much more expanded.)

An artist does not need permission nor a license to be one. Not even a qualification. As a New York Times article put it,” ..Their job description, if they have one, is to operate outside accepted limits.”

So what do artists really ‘do”? If you ask me, it’s any or all of these things.

1) They create things out of nothing.

2) They bring the audience to emotional, pyschological, spiritual places where even they have never been, and sometimes do not dare to go. But they do it.

3) They surprise, delight, shock, awe to awaken people and bring them to new undiscovered states.

4) They live out their nightmares/visions for others too scared to live theirs that their audience may have courage to do it.

5) They sometimes successfully turn  their private pain/ demons, fears into something eternally  and universally beautiful.

6) They physicalize into movement, music, and various forms what they are!

7) They can’t help but create!

So, before senators, bishops, or anyone who ever needed to get some sort of license or formal validation start interrogating, or questioning, or forcing their beliefs on artists and defining what art should be, take heed: please know that your ‘understanding’ of  artists, their reality and what they do  are nowhere near what it truly is.

You live in a world of tangibles, of measurable objects, of defined paradigms, of limits. Outside the parameters of where your fences end, where you dare not look or even cross is where the artist world may just be starting.