Art is a Team Game
TRUE (Tuesday Round Up of Everything) post #3, 7/1/14
No matter what the stereotypes or even an individual artist's stated intentions, the act of making art for other people is a fundamentally optimistic one. It presupposes not only a faith (sometimes mistaken for narcissism--and sometimes accurately pegged as narcissism) that one has something worth articulating but also that other people want to hear it, can be reached, can be moved by whatever that thing is.
It's pretty much impossible to argue that art is a team game. But too many people forget that it is absolutely and unequivocally a cooperative one. You can go ahead and count awards and sales and compute rankings any way you like. In the end, though, if humanity as a whole gets better, and if people individually have richer, more satisfying, more stirred and engaged lives, then everyone wins. And if either of those things doesn't happen, everyone loses.
For that reason, more than any other at this point, I've been grateful that a lot of my best work seems to fall somewhere in the murkier corners of the big tent of horror. Because the horror community is full of people hellbent on making us a community. Peter Straub goes so far out of his way, so often, to support so many. Ramsey Campbell has been supportive way beyond what I would ever have asked of him. Lucius Shepard was like that. So is Liz Hand.
The latest person to fall--or, rise--into this category, for me, is Christopher Golden.
Nothing may come of anything we've been talking about, and that isn't the point of this post. The point is, because he likes my work, he has veered far off his own path to help me find mine. To see if our paths intersect. To make sure I know he hopes so.
Most of these TRUE posts are going to be about art, because art is so fun to chatter and argue about. A few are going to be about people. Because in cases like this, I can't think of anything truer.
No matter what the stereotypes or even an individual artist's stated intentions, the act of making art for other people is a fundamentally optimistic one. It presupposes not only a faith (sometimes mistaken for narcissism--and sometimes accurately pegged as narcissism) that one has something worth articulating but also that other people want to hear it, can be reached, can be moved by whatever that thing is.
It's pretty much impossible to argue that art is a team game. But too many people forget that it is absolutely and unequivocally a cooperative one. You can go ahead and count awards and sales and compute rankings any way you like. In the end, though, if humanity as a whole gets better, and if people individually have richer, more satisfying, more stirred and engaged lives, then everyone wins. And if either of those things doesn't happen, everyone loses.
For that reason, more than any other at this point, I've been grateful that a lot of my best work seems to fall somewhere in the murkier corners of the big tent of horror. Because the horror community is full of people hellbent on making us a community. Peter Straub goes so far out of his way, so often, to support so many. Ramsey Campbell has been supportive way beyond what I would ever have asked of him. Lucius Shepard was like that. So is Liz Hand.
The latest person to fall--or, rise--into this category, for me, is Christopher Golden.
Nothing may come of anything we've been talking about, and that isn't the point of this post. The point is, because he likes my work, he has veered far off his own path to help me find mine. To see if our paths intersect. To make sure I know he hopes so.
Most of these TRUE posts are going to be about art, because art is so fun to chatter and argue about. A few are going to be about people. Because in cases like this, I can't think of anything truer.
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