The artist can feel a friction between producing art for oneself or for the audience. It’s a creative push and pull, wanting to create what one thinks is masterful to what others think is.
One can’t live without the other, they’re interdependent. The push/pull, the friction, the questioning is the process of art itself.
The audience is only in the artist’s mind – a creation trigger, sometimes a muse sometimes a distraction.
Mastery is also in the artist’s mind. Who is to say what is unique, original, legendary if only the artist is the judge?
The whole time the artist wrestles only with one’s mind, with oneself.
There is no actual friction, there is only the process of creation.
One can only express who they are in that moment, and by doing so, learn about their own views of mastery.
And that expression, when so vulnerably displayed, allows the audience to be part of the process of learning.
There is no judgment from the outside, only self-understanding on the inside.
What is expressed next is the outcome of those learnings and how they are digested in oneself. How they are processed.
And the cycle continues.
Is the art changing or is the artist?
They’re one and the same, expressions of each other. The artist becomes the art and the audience, processes of expression being continually shaped in the mind.
But it’s no longer a singular mind, but a collective one. It includes the artist’s evolving view of mastery and the audience’s evolving view of the art.
The label, “artist”, disappears. What remains is the dynamic movement of the world.
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