Happy B-day sugaree, eriskably, baileylambert12
Interesting discussions today on artists and the ethics of art...
I live in a family of artists. My husband is a musician and an artist who makes his living as a production designer in the film industry. His family is full of visual artists, painters, photographers, designers... My mother was a concert violinist; my sister is a novelist. We raised our own children in museums of every variety, in weekends and Sundays of family film festivals and in very loud and very enthusiastic family jam sessions, lol. But none of it was ever that deep; it was the way we played together. Instruments and cameras were hands on ways to create fun, with friends and with family.
At some point, as our children became teenagers, these tools became part of the voice they used to express themselves and create meaning in their own worlds, apart from us; it grew into something more serious. Music became one son's world; writing scripts and telling stories with words and on camera became the passion of another; my daughter became a graphic designer.
Ironically, even though my own husband pursued an artistic career, I would have been
happy had my children used their college scholarships to become doctors or CEO's or for any number of careers that would have offered them a more direct, less tenuous path to financial stability, LOL. However, art drives them, sometmes almost consumes them these
days, and they cannot imagine doing anything else with their lives at the present time- so, decisions made, I now sit back and enjoy sharing their creative journey, and much
better quality Sunday get together film festivals and jam sessions than the ones my husband and I originally began with them years ago. I think of Eber and his CDs and that costume
box...
On the subject of art and ethics... I have mixed feelings. There are artists of all different varieties who hold values and beliefs with which I do not agree, but once they put their love, their hate, their fear, their joy into their creation, if it is good, and especially if it is great, the art becomes a living creation in itself, and my relationship with it can be entirely
separate from the artist. It becomes part of me as I let it into my life, born from my own
feeling and my own experience and my own personal interaction with it.
However, I am very human, and there have been times when my distaste for an artist interferes with my ability to rationally separate that artist from his work and taints my relationship with the art he creates from the beginning.
On that note, and in a much lighter one, would "after the fact distaste" for an artist make me want to put aside a suit I already had come to love and that had the imprint of my
own experiences embedded within its threads, LOL? Who knows? It likely depends on the
depth and intensity of how my own personal experiences rubbed up against the artist's actions.
We all have different experiences, and people react differently than I do to events for a myriad of reasons that I know nothing about.
Wear the clothes; don't wear the clothes. Appreciate the art; boycott the artist. It's your call. Go ahead and make it, and let me make my own.
~October music is calling to me... Hope Adam feels the call (ish)
(( in 02 seconds flat.
