Art, Artist, and Are They?

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The democratization of technology has made tools once exclusive to professionals now accessible to everyone. Anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can become a photographer, a musician, a painter, an artist, an author, or a poet. The barriers to entry have been dismantled so thoroughly that the true essence of being an artist has been diluted to the point of absurdity. Gone are the days when art required peer review and validation by credible authorities. When people understood the concept of being rejected and accepted the idea of not being good enough.

The self-serve platforms have effectively obliterated the need for hardened training to excel in any craft. Instead, we're drowning in a sea of self-proclaimed artists who possess the tools but lack the discipline and skill honed through years of dedication and critique. The result? An overwhelming flood of what can only be described as worthless "art." Even the quality of popular art has nosedived, making it painfully obvious that very little created by these "artists" can be considered high art anymore. And I am not just talking about one medium—it's everywhere. Instagram has turned everyone with a camera into a photographer. Spotify and Soundcloud have done the same for musicians. And as if the personal blog pages on social media were not enough for the verbal diarrhoea, there came self-publishing houses offering an ISBN to anyone who has enough money even if they cannot tell the difference between a sonnet and a ballad. Let it be known to whoever needs to hear this but using arbitrary line breaks in a sentence does not make it a haiku. All that these platforms have managed to do is quench the thirst for finding an identity among the privileged classes. People might argue that self-publishing has given well-deserving authors a chance to share their work without being at the mercy of publishers. Or that platforms like SoundCloud and Spotify have supposedly liberated music artists from record labels, preventing them from becoming sellouts. But here's the rub: those same publishing houses now offer self-publishing packages that the deserving authors might not afford. Spotify pays pennies for streams, but anyone with the cash to book a studio can call themselves a music artist.

The need to find their identity is so all-consuming in the youth that they want to attach themselves to the first label they can find. And the character and personality they build around it becomes so tragically reinforced that they would spiral into an identity crisis if it ever breaks. To them, I say take a page from the life of John-Paul Sartre. He refused the Nobel Prize for Literature because he did not want to become "institutionalised". He did not want to attach that title to his identity because it would have hampered his ability to speak his thoughts more than the credibility it would have given him.

I will end with a link to a poem by Charles Bukowski. This is not only for writers but anyone who is trying to be an artist.