How to Create Art That Doesn’t Matter

Art matters… right? This question can bring up mixed feelings for many artists. On the one hand, every artist and art lover carries an unshakeable, if unspoken, knowledge that art does matter, that it has inestimable value, and that the creation of art carries out a life-giving purpose in our world.

On the other hand, our society tells us at nearly every turn that the arts don’t really matter. Parents tell aspiring artists to go into a more financially stable career. Schools, facing budget cuts, axe the arts first. Politicians and economists tell us that what really moves the world are money, fame, technology, and power – areas of concern in which art doesn’t really seem to have a place. 

The ugly truth is that, despite the transcendent potential for the arts we feel in our hearts, and despite the knowledge we, as artists and art lovers carry about the true purpose of the arts, the way we now create, perform, practice, teach, and make a living as artists often reinforces the impotence and irrelevance of the arts.

Despite our best efforts to nonetheless follow the guidance of our creative souls, many artists experience a life of needless effort, disconnection, meaninglessness, pain, and struggle. It can be felt in the daily grind of artistic careers that regard our creative spirit as a resource to be extracted rather than a gift to be honored. It can be felt in the anxiety that comes from trying to put on a perfect technical performance rather than one that features the authentic channeling of our soul. It can be felt in the chronic injuries that come from regarding our body as a wayward machine to be corrected through constant vigilance and effort. It can also be felt in the perverse feelings artists carry towards money; either in hungrily regarding our art as a commodity and our audiences as primarily a source of income, or in the disdain for money and selling that prevents us from sustaining ourselves financially.

As a result of this sort of dispiriting approach to the arts, our art sometimes falls flat, feels inauthentic, or at the very least fails to have its full transformative potential. The result for our audiences is the consumption of our art fails to satisfy their longings for inspiration, healing, and connection. These realities are often a source of anxiety and depression for artists, leading us to wonder why we got into the arts in the first place.

If we continue to create in this way, the result will be creative death. Our bodies will break down with chronic injuries, our creativity will dry up, our souls will throb with anxiety and self-doubt, and we will continue to struggle with finding satisfying and sustainable opportunities to share our artistic gifts. While our creations may carry a certain power through their technical prowess, popular appeal, or monetary benefit, deep down we will know that our artistic life contradicts everything we love and value about the arts.

These kinds of experiences are both the cause, and further result of, our society’s view of the frivolity and impotence of the arts. Even though these experiences contradict our heart’s knowledge, they carry real cultural weight because, in a strange way, they point to something true: the arts approached from a dispiriting place become devoid of everything that makes them meaningful and enlivening. Art created in agreement with the story of a lifeless universe is likewise lifeless. It is art without its transformative potential – its Soulforce – and without Soulforce, what’s the point?