"Who's an Artist?"

A Homily for "Hot Art in a Cool Space"
GNOUU Shared Service
Sunday, August 2, 2009

Who's an artist? is a question without an objective answer. The reply depends a lot on context. If you ask a New York socialite or a critic for Art News, you will get one kind of answer. If you ask a native of an indigenous culture, the answer will likely be completely different.

By one kind of definition, there are very few artists. By other definitions, everyone who creates is an artist. And in some cultures, there are a great many more people doing the creating than in other cultures. Have you ever been to Bali, or seen the national Geographic special on television about Bali? Despite the many changes on this small island caused by contact with the modern world, the culture of Bali survives, and in that culture, everyone is an artist, creating with dance, music, fabric, paints, stone, wood, and wax.

In our culture, on the other hand, there is a wide forbidding boundary between high art and low art and between art and craft. There are highly policed demarcations between classical and so-called folk music -- although Louis Armstrong once said he thought all music was made by "folks." Most Americans hear the voice of their inner Censor (as Artist's Way author Julia Cameron calls it) all too clearly, that inner nasty Critic that says, "You can't write -- you can't sing -- you can't draw -- you can't paint -- you don't know anything about color, texture, or harmony. You shouldn't even try. You're completely untalented."

And so, despite the bursts of creativity in our lives -- the times when we rise above our censor and get in touch with the Power within and without us, the times when we bake something or cook something, inventing a new recipe or tweaking a familiar one and our loved ones exclaim, "This is delicious!", the times when we paint a room an unusual, unexpected color or hang curtains of a strange texture and our friend say, "I would never have thought of that but it looks wonderful!", the times when we envision a change in our garden and plan and replant and tend it carefully so that Spring brings a riot of color and form and scent and our neighbors and even folks driving by stop to admire the beauty, the times that, armed only with the family camera, we take a shot worthy to be framed and hung in a gallery, the times when we raise our voice in song, either alone in the car or the shower or with others in a choir or chorus, and think secretly, "I sounded pretty good right there" -- despite this experience, which we all have, we think we are not artists, that only certain other people are worthy to be called artists.

Each and every one of us has had times in our lives when our spirit of creativity, however squashed and pushed down and hidden and shamed, has escaped, and we feel good about something we have made, something we have created. Like the people of Bali, we are all artists, but unlike them, our culture designates only an elite few. Unlike the people of Bali, we are not supported by a context and culture of artistic expression. Instead we are locked inside ourselves, convinced by our Censor that only a few are blessed with the power to create.

Have you ever heard the story of Michaelangelo's "David"? In that time, a giant block of Carrara marble was brought to Florence, and the whole city grieved over it, for it was obviously flawed. The stone block was crooked, not straight, and the sculptors all agreed it could not be used, and so it was rejected. Only the young Michaelangelo could see inside that flawed block of marble the young shepherd David of the Bible, needing to be freed from his stone prison. Today we look at Michaelangelo's "David" and marvel at its power and beauty; we cannot imagine the "flawed" block of marble from which this David emerged.

Every one of us is like that flawed marble. Inside of each of us is a creative spirit yearning to be set free from its "flawed" casing. Inside of you and me is an artist struggling to emerge.

Who's an artist? Slow down before you answer that question. Slow down, and wake up. Who's an artist? You are, if you only let yourself.