Which doesn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t take a stance on a given issue, or that I wouldn’t have an opinion about it (though in some cases I might not), but that my identity is not so ephemeral a thing as to come into and out of existence with the politics and ‘issues’ of the day.
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I do know that I will not define myself by, or base my identity on, any stance I might take on any particular 'issue’, and that the tendency of many people to appear to do so is odious to me.
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I say “perhaps” because I’m not on sure footing here. One of the reasons political discussions are so detestable is that a person can hardly make a statement, within the contexts of those discussions, that does not produce connotations that the person did not intend.
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This isn’t to say that conservatism is opposed to the arts in principle, or that ‘openness’ is not a trait that will be found among those who identify with conservative positions (that would be a lie, which the more sophomoric forms of liberalism would be happy to perpetuate), but that the ‘openness’ that characterizes the temperament of artists individually, and the atmosphere of the arts in general, perhaps isn’t as prevalent in conservatism, or is buried more deeply within it.
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So that those who are drawn to the arts (and who involve themselves in the arts as, say, creators or curators or administrators or ‘scenesters’) are, most frequently, those whose ‘openness’, psychologically speaking, is mirrored in their cultural and political tendencies, and habits of mind.
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This is because the trait of ‘openness’, which in psychology is associated with creativity, and thus with the arts (insofar as the arts are creative), is more immediately discernible in the spirit of liberalism than in that of conservatism.
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I say ‘today’, but I suspect that such has always been the case, or has been the case more often than not.
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For socio-historical reasons, as well as psychological reasons, the ideologies most prevalent among would-be artists today are the left-leaning ones.
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Which isn’t to say that every artist who is ideologically bound realizes as much. Most likely they’ll be oblivious to the fact, or will shield themselves from an awareness of it, or will otherwise rationalize it. No one wants to see themself as a sentimentalist, or a propagandist.
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This is because ideologies reduce complexity until any truths they try to articulate lose vitality, and any beauty through which they might find expression is weaponized, and thereby diminished. All artists know that, in the context of their work, beauty and truth arise unexpectedly, as a sort of accident (even if such an accident is sought); these things will not function in the service of anything but themselves.
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An artist who mistakes ideology for interior ‘sight’, and thinks they can substitute the former for the latter, in their work, merely because an ideology does not participate in the ‘visible' (and instead is immaterial), will remain a would-be artist, regardless of how proficient they are with their medium.
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Of course, there are other reasons why an artwork might be ‘unrealized’, but I am speaking about one particular reason, the reason that involves an absence of interior ‘sight’.
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Their works will then suffer insofar as those works are unrealized; and those works will be unrealized insofar as they pertain to, and are directed by, the ‘visible’ alone.
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I do not mean that this ‘sight’ is inaccessible to a would-be artist (though in some cases it may be), but that a would-be artist will not recognize how integral such ‘sight’ is to the production of art itself, because such a conception of ‘sight’ will likely not be present to their consciousness.
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In other words, an artist will have found this ‘sight’, and have learned how to employ it, whereas a would-be artist will not have done so.
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I am not, it is true, referring to visible things. But I am referring to things that exist nonetheless. Things of such dimension and weight that, though immaterial, they orient us in our metaphysical fields.
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I use the word ‘sight’ here because it suggests that physical sense by which we measure distances between ourselves and the things of reality, and thus situate ourselves in relation to them.
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Perhaps the most essential characteristic of an artist isn’t even a proficiency, in the strict sense of that word, but the integration of their interior ‘sight’ with the outward expressions of their talent.
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Technical proficiency in the mediums that constitute the arts is not uncommon among adults, but technical proficiency is not the sole characteristic of an artist.
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Relatedly, not every adult that involves themself in art as an activity, or a profession, is an artist.