Tag: inspiration

What is art?

Posted on by philipdodson

All art is useless, I think Oscar Wilde said that.

A fork is useful but I could live without a fork. Art is use-less but I couldn’t live without it.

We slave away in our so called ‘proper’ jobs doing very important stuff to earn lots of money. We’re told at school and by parents that the arts aren’t important and we need to focus on math, science etc so we can get those ‘proper’ jobs.

Then what do we spend our money on from our proper jobs? Well, art for the house, music to listen to, we go to watch a play, we go to the cinema to watch a film, we watch TV, we watch YouTube, we buy a beautifully designed and crafted piece of furniture, we pay an architect to design our new house, we buy a beautifully designed fancy car that looks amazing and so on.

Yep, we work hard to spend our money on stuff that artists, musicians, actresses, designers, architects, creative writers, and so on, who have worked tirelessly as an artist to bring you their art to entertain you or for your enjoyment.

Art is imperfect and it is the imperfect that we love in life, the cracks are how the light gets in.

Useful things are just that, utilitarian and functional. Art is the life and soul of the party, the reason to be alive.

Art is life and without it life would be just useful. I want a use-less life filled with art.

Critics

Posted on by philipdodson

When we come from a place where we look for the good in what we do and see things how others see our work we start to get even better at what we do. When we start with kindness towards ourselves we change the internal narratives.

We have been conditioned to be our own biggest critic and that comes from the mind and its fears. Add to that the cultural norm of ‘you can do better’ mentality instilled in us from our formative years in order to satisfy the egos of others and to prepare us for a life of servitude to working for others. It creates a default reaction of self-criticism and it is a shield we put up to ‘protect’ ourselves from the perceived judgement of others. However, this behaviour only serves to affect our self-esteem and causes us to suffer within.

We never feel inspired or motivated after beating ourselves up.

However, if we choose to be our biggest fan instead then we are proud of our work and we grow in self-confidence and we feel good.

It inspires us to build on what we have already achieved and to look positively on what we have done not what we didn’t do or did badly in our eyes.

When we focus on what we did well we free ourselves from the negative energy of looking at what we think we did wrong.

Lastly, we are all already worthy of love and belonging from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to sleep, no matter what we did or didn’t do that day.