Art Needs Everyone
Click to viewMadonna as an up-and-coming artist, before "Like a Virgin" came out.
It's odd, I think, that the artistic world I'm most surrounded by is the music world. I understand that perhaps it's because our world is saturated by music these days, but I don't listen to the radio or watch TV much. I've self-selected to listen to my iPod all of the time, discovering new music from all sorts of avenues, but none of them the mainstream. I have bad pitch, and very little sense of rhythm on my own. Still, I wonder if my parents had found me a new piano teacher when we moved if I would have chosen music as my outlet, or even my secondary outlet.
I used to reteach myself piano about once a year and give a Christmas "concert" in our living room. But I was nineteen before I really started getting into music, and I'm still learning about classics. I discovered the Red Hot Chili Peppers this weekend, for instance. That's okay. I don't believe that it has an expiration date.
But this got me thinking about art and how we express ourselves. Most artists, I think, play in more than one field. I used to draw some, I used to do theatre and I miss it. Other than that, I don't have anything secondary, except perhaps DJing. When I did that, I was good at it, and I love making playlists. But in general, all I have are my words. I hope that's enough. I do plan to get back into theatre through the youth with disabilities people here, and maybe take guitar lessons. The former I suspect won't be very artsy and the latter I may not be good at.
Oh well. It makes me wonder, though, what to do those who have no art do? How do they express and converse with the art they see?
The bring people to it. To TV shows, to Dolls concerts. They put up Youtube videos. And we need those people, to bring us together. Art needs everyone. For an artist, creation may be solitary, but that is only a part of it. This is most visible in the music world, the community, and I think that's why I ended up there.
Written on my old computer, with a new keyboard.