There was this one time when a group of us gathered in a pop up gallery, friends helping the curator preparing for an artshow. Well most of us were, the joke had just been made of “wait till so&so shows up, an hour late and she will sit down with food and then leave without having helped.”
Barely five minutes later and The One of us came an hour late, to say she had been there, sat with her carry out bag and ate.
Another friend of mine walks into the gallery and the eater asks “Are you are artist, too?” To which my always a-little-messing with peoples heads smiles and says “It depends on what you mean by art” to which the eater replied “Everything is art!”
And to which I replied out loud before any thought and with a snort “That’s such bullshit.”
My strong reaction was the fact that artists work for their art, they might be born with a talent, but they must work for the skill to sharpen that talent, form that talent and build it…or a talent ends up as nothing more than left on the shelf collecting dust and growing mold.
I consider myself artistic and art-loving, but not yet have I made it to the podium for my medal of being an artist. It isn’t about what is published or the shows I curate and produce, it is about the hours put in. The mistakes, the tried and failed. The blood, sweat and tears. Hours, days, weeks, months, and years, and that dedication. No, I haven’t earned that title…that medal yet.
A lot of people have talent, not a lot use it. Much talent lays to waste over laziness.
But to say that everyone can be an artist or that everything is art is to discredit the work, blood, sweat and tears…the hours and hours of work that an artist actually puts into their creating.
Being an any good artist who produces an any good art is an entire other topic.
No, not everything is art and thus everybody an artist anymore than everybody is a college educated CEO of a major billion dollar company or a brain surgery is not something that just everybody can do.
I don’t discredit my car mechanic for their work because I simply don’t know it all. Or hell, even my garbage man because it’s not a job I would want to do…that man gets his credit. And I don’t diminish the credit deserving on my favorite singers, painters, writers, dancers, sculptors and more…who create art out of a nothing that nobody saw there before…creating a something for everybody to see, that little glimpse within their mind shared.
So, no, not “everything” is art. Everything can inspire art. But not everyone is inspired the same, or at all. Art can be pulled from everything. Everybody can feel their heart swell at the site of an ocean shoreline during sunset, but only a artist will take that experience and turn it into…something, called art.
Something that causes us to then be able to feel that chest swelling feeling without even the ocean shoreline during sunset being n our own line of vision.
Art is not everything, but an Artist in everything can make art found.
A Kind Of Single Lady 