The myth that artists have to “suffer” in order to create great work comes largely from the perennial human fascination with disaster porn, with a soupçon of militant Puritanism thrown in.
And it pisses me off.
@sanspoint Exactly. It infuriates me to see douchebags feeding into the myth.
@lilithsaintcrow It's kind of funny how a dramatic improvement in my general wellbeing coincided so neatly with my sudden lack of interest in creating art and music, though. For me, they were a means of escape and a source of optimism about the future, the latter because I harboured dreams about becoming a professional and imagined that "making it" would make me happy.
@thor My own creative output is professional; if I don't write, we don't eat, and the mortgage doesn't get paid. Both paths are valid!
@lilithsaintcrow @thor is thre a difference between a professional artist and an entertainer?
@lilithsaintcrow @thor in that case I'd agree, it's not always necessary to suffer in order to entertain - except maybe stand-up comedy and 19th Century Russian novels.
@lilithsaintcrow @thor Gotcha, so Dostoevsky didn't really need to suffer to write something like Brothers Karamazov. It was all a scam to get four years of free penal servitude out him. What a sucker that guy was.
@lilithsaintcrow I thought it came from how much WWI poetry and writing we do in school, myself.
Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) said that it's because so much art depends on conflict and people in conflict are usually suffering.
The conflict in their lives leaks into the art, but they never made the concious connection. So if they get better, their art declines because they don't realize it needs conflict.
@suetanvil @Canageek I don’t agree. Plenty of people create to *escape* or give themselves a haven from conflict. And “decline” is such a subjective judgment.
@suetanvil @Canageek Just because an artist’s process or subject matter changes doesn’t necessarily mean a “decline.” I’m extremely wary of that manner of thinking.
Fair enough. I just thought it was an interesting take on the subject.
(To be clear (AIUI), Olson isn't attributing the decline to a lack of personal problems; it's due to a lack of awareness in how the problems affected the art. But anyway, I generally agree with your position on this.)
@suetanvil @Canageek Ah, I see your point. Thanks for clarifying.
What artists need is to live. To make art relatable, it needs to use the human condition as a point of reference.
As it turns out, the human condition is made up of more than just suffering.
"Suffering, joy, redemption and decay."
@jankoekepan Not to mention bacon, kittens, and the smell of rain rising from dusty earth.
@lilithsaintcrow Artists do their best work when they can devote time and energy to their craft, not when they're struggling to survive. That we know the good art that comes from struggling artists is literally survivorship bias.