How wrong is it to pursue art? Arthur painted a sketch. Peter didn’t like it. What if I change the names to Arvind and Prashant? The word processor shows red underline under the two new names. Prashant did not like what Arvind made. What did Arvind make? What was the subject of the painting? What was in the background of the painting? Did he paint according to the rules of perspective or did he ignore the rules and experimented something? Of course these do not matter to the onlooker. The onlooker is interested in the feeling the art work produces.
The feelings produced do not have much variety. Art is dull. What change can a painting make to one’s life? On and on how long can someone look at a painting? Unless you become a world renowned artist, there is no point of art and it is not easy to become a world renowned artist. It is easier to get a job. Find a profession and invest your life whole-heartedly into it. But the profession gets boring. It fails to bring all that I have. The job fails my intensity, my passions, everything in me. What do I do then? The world has given me something by now then, two things actually. Money and power. What do I do with these? The noblest of things are possible with money and power. There is no need to denigrate either money or power. 98% of all of humanity’s achievements have come through either money or power. Even art depends on and has always depended on money. “But I am doing my job that I do not particularly like. Isn’t that noble enough?” It is. It is. It is the noblest of things to work on a job that one does not particularly like. The person feels like a stoic at best. At worst he can be a lot of different things. And why blame people? Everyone is free to do whatever they want to do. I just want to look at the question how wrong is it to pursue art?
The primary objection to art is that it is a hard and difficult pursuit. It is not easy to find suitable success in art. It is a foolhardy goal. And so people who are around a person who wants to pursue some form of art slowly, surely and subtly discourage. “Yes, yes, you can do art. But how will you feed yourself?” “Yes, yes, do art. But have a back-up plan as well.” But the bitch thing about art is that it constantly keeps making you feel inadequate. Other jobs people master. No job is particularly hard for average human intelligence. But art is like an abyss and no matter how much effort you put in, it is always insufficient. Alfred Lord Tennyson lived 83 years. He wrote poetry for 70 years of his life. Yet he could not comprehensively cover the one subject that invigorated his soul. So, not only success is not guaranteed, even satisfaction is hard to come by. Better get a job and get on with your life.
So, no success, no satisfaction, and surely no encouragement from people around. If a person still continues to pursue art it must be admitted that there is something demonic about art itself. It is life-draining and soul-tormenting. And the artist is really quite helpless in front of this muse that is not even properly visible. This is the reason why you should never pursue art. And if you do, you are doomed. So is everybody around you. Give up while you still can. If not, then the only thing you can hope for is something good comes out of it at some point. Before you die. The rest is just not worth talking about.
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