True Art Hurts

Before I begin: I don't like to keep gates. I strongly dislike those who do. However; there is a difference between the music that the backstreet boys make, and the music that the red hot chili peppers make. One is created to sell records, and one is created to express what is inside the creator. That's what these thoughts are about.

The hardest thing about art, true art, is that it actually feels as if it’s a part of the artist. This piece of one’s body being sent out to the cruelty of the masses. For what reason? What purpose is there is bearing one’s soul that way*. Exposing one’s most vulnerable place. Maybe to change how people see the world. Maybe because there is something irreconcilable about existence. An incongruence that never leaves you. Unless you give it a way out. Unless you create something. You put that part of you, that thing that can’t be comprehended, into creation. Because feelings must be experienced. You create something from this part of you. You put this piece of you into artistic expression. And because of its origin, this artistic expression is you. Attached to you, still. Even though it’s "just" a painting, poem, song, or sculpture. It is still you. It’s your DNA. It’s your mind, your soul. It’s your reason. It’s who you are. It’s you. 

But then, we take this part of us, this thing of beauty and pain and the self, and we send it out. We set it free. Like a mama bird we push it out of the nest. And then people come along and if they want to, they can say mean things about the beauty we just put ourselves into. And that can hurt. Badly. They can treat this part of you as if it’s merely an object disconnected from feeling: inanimate and lifeless. And, biologically speaking, sure, it is not a life form, but I still put my body into it. And my body will receive whatever criticism befalls my creation. Because that’s what true art is. True art doesn’t aim for popularity, success, pleasing others, appropriateness, order, structure, rules, or any other boundary. It fact, true art strives to pierce those ideas because true art comes from the understanding that when an animal is caged it will always try to escape. And true art bursts through societal norms and expectations. True art is the expression of self. And true artists hate cages.

*I don't use question marks to identify rhetorical questions, deal with it