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Welcome back everyone. In this second part of the episode, the artist’s Creative Dilemmas, we will continue our journey around the artist, creative dilemmas as previously introduced. I'll be reading from an early chapter of the book.

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Art and fear observation on the perils and rewards of art making by David Baileys and Ted Orland.

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And add a few comments afterwards, although the book mainly focuses on visual arts, paintings, sculptures and photography, it is so well written and on point with regard to artistic creativity that it is easy to transfer.

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Basically everything.

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Onto the music world.

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The first two points that we previously discussed were .1.

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Art making involves skills that can be learned, and we said how important it is to pay attention to your craftsmanship and the other was art is made by ordinary people.

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Which contradicts the the common assumption that to create good art, one must be a flawless being or an overwhelmingly unique, talented person. The typical genius story.

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While there are geniuses around being normally flawed and imperfect, is the best starting point for making real, authentic and beautiful art.

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Now on to the Third Point. This is a long long quote.

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Point 3:

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And Quote: making art and viewing art are different at their core.

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The viewers concerns are not your concerns, although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.

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Their job is whatever it is to be moved by art to be entertained by it, to make a killing of it. Whatever.

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Your job the artist is to learn to work on your work.

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Art making can be a rather lonely, thankless affair. Virtually all artists spend some of their time producing work that no one else much cares about.

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But for some reason, self defence, perhaps artists find it tempting to romanticise this lack of response.

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The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that works.

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The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work.

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And a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art.

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End of quote.

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There is not much I can comment on. This point is a summary of all the possible answers to the many questions arising from the creative process.

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Why am I working on this? Who would ever be interested in it? Why would my work ever matter to anyone? Should I pay attention to what people like and do? Something like that? Should I pay attention to what people think about my work and adjust it to it, and if so, to what degree?

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Is it normal for artists to spend their time in this loneliness? Almost every project I spend my time working on is worthless to me, and I suspect everyone else is. My commitment to art also worthless. Am I the protagonist of a tragic story of an artist who is valuable?

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Forgotten and only after death I will be recognised as a true great artist. Do I enjoy that story? Do I see myself as such?

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As a final comment on this, it has been my personal story with music, one that begins in alignment with everyone's opinion and likes family, friends, etcetera.

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And as I grew up, I started demanding more from the music. I experienced both as listeners and as pianists.

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And the gaps, the holes, the problems started arising, questioning everything, including what is the point?

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The constant relation with outside pressures the viewers can be everything from kind, friendly to anxiety, raising nerve, racking to.

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Destructive.

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It has been part of my work as artist to develop a relationship with this dimension too, cause it never really resolves. It has taken its toll on my life. It still isn't. It probably continued doing so.

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I invite my students and those of you listening who are on the artist path to embrace their own struggles as part of their own artistic path.

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And the final point, the 4th from the book Art and Fear.

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Another long quote.

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Art making has been around longer than the art establishment.

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Through most of history.

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The people who made art never thought of themselves as making art. In fact, it's quite presumable that art was being made long before the rise of consciousness, long before the pronoun I was ever employed.

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The painters of caves, quite apart from not thinking of themselves as artists, probably never thought of them of themselves at all.

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What this suggests, among other things, is that the current view equating art with self-expression reveals moral contemporary bias in our thinking.

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Then an underlying trait of the medium.

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Even the separation of art from craft is largely a post Renaissance concept.

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And more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do and represents what you are.

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In the past few centuries, Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of Orthodox religious sins to one person. Displays of personal cosmologies.

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Quote unquote artist has gradually become a form of identity, which, as every artist knows, often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits.

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Consider that if artist equals self.

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Then, when, inevitably you make flawed art, you are a flawed person.

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And when worse yet, you make no art. You are no person at all.

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It seems far healthier to sidestep the vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful art making.

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From reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual fall card to fine art.

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One of those paths is yours.

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This is the end of court. I think this is so important.

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Today we have come to the conclusion assumption that art is something we do as individuals.

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And society strongly reinforces this view.

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In many ways, for example, by attaching moral aesthetic values to the person who created art or music. In other words, we project the things we find in the art onto the maker, the performer, or the creator.

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So much that.

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When artists have a public persona, we follow them, admire them, be inspired by what they say or the way they behave. Look at the way cult of personality in pop rock music is accepted as normal.

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To the point that in order to promote their own music or art emerging artists, they must fundamentally promote themselves.

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As necessary as it is in the modern world, I still find it astounding how easy it has become to mix the two the artist some one talented in some area who has developed into a profession and the work of art which might have virtually nothing to do with the person who made it.

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Today, more than ever, the society will live in the community we are part of is actually a very complex network of communities intertwined with each other.

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Family friends work neighbourhood the city we live in the country we we we belong and through the Internet we also belong in various ways to a number of real virtual or half real half virtual communities.

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One community could be the musical one, and we might be part of a more specific one, like the pop or rock community. We have our history in that community, our relationships, ideas and opinions all been quite separated from the other communities. We are part of.

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Say in the pop music community, we are constant.

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Broadcasted examples of individuals who just by following their own individual creative inspiration, have come to become successful artist. But if we scratch the surface, we see how individual success is the result of the.

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Artist work.

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Being broadcasted pushed into a community by larger economic forces and interests, often a much larger virtual global community.

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If you think, for example, of a current pop artist like Taylor Swift, her music connects millions of teenagers around the world thanks to forces that have nothing to do with music and thinking of the Internet technology, media and communication agents, promoters, distributors, online platforms, performance.

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And use, etc etc etc. This is a huge varied community of people who have nothing in common held together by economic interest which align on the potential of an artist like Taylor Swift.

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We can say.

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Taylor Swift is an artist who expresses her individual self, but we must acknowledge how her music by serving a massive community made of half teenagers, half music professionals, is bringing together time under the spell of her songs.

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A network of communities of people that have nothing in common as individuals, apart from believing in the value of the music.

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Yeah.

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Artists such as her have the unique talent of knowing those communities well and being able to work their way around the many contradictions these communities carry amongst them.

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She manages to make music that is at once representative of a large network of communities.

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And that is still remarkably individual. In other words, she manages, I think, quite successfully, to interpret her community so well.

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To align yourself to it.

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To make music that inspires both.

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With the necessary distinctions, we could make a similar case for many, if not all, successful artists in the pop rock community or in the jazz, classical or any other.

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Art and music do have this potential of tapping in a communal dimension, a collective consciousness even that transcends us as individuals and creates bridges.

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If I learn anything out of the Taylor Swift story is that as an artist, while finding my own individual expression by making my work.

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I might as well think that I am part of a community and create work for the benefit of the Community.

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After all, I would be possibly using material and ideas that for the most part have not originated by any individually, meaning I took those from the already existing vocabulary of artistic ideas and techniques.

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This thought process is very healthy, I believe.

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Firstly, it places me in my work in the real world, human relationships and a network of aligning or conflicting interests, which ultimately will challenge my motivations creatively and my creative process.

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Secondly, it makes me pause it a distance between me and my work, as if I were just a vehicle for it, a gifted interpreter of my communities, wishes, hopes, feelings, stances.

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And thirdly, it makes me wonder about what matters at a broader scale.

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Rather than searching for what is true and beautiful for me, I start seeking what would be true and beautiful for my community.

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Rather than looking for who I am, what do I believe? What do I love? Like, what do I want to see or experience aesthetically in the world?

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I would extend the question outside the limits of my own perspective and ask.

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What does my community believe? Love, like one, need to experience aesthetically in the world.

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If we consider the enormous success that certain individual artists had.

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From Beethoven to Stevie Wonder, from Bach to Bob Dylan, we might see how their art transcends their person, their country, and even their time, and connects people across nationalities and even centuries.

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We might say how lucky they were to be making their art at the right time and place, how fortunate they were that their individual artistic statement was exactly what the world needed at that time.

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That they found themselves in perfect alignment with their own time, culture, and even beyond that.

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Or we can flip the perspective and consider how deep and unique was the object they were seeking.

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How remarkable and insightful was their view of the world? How profoundly different was their perspective from any other? And yet, how more authentic and meaningful it was to them and many other whom they never met? In other words, my final words?

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If we ponder on the statement that says people have ideas but also ideas have people.

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We can appreciate how necessary it was that a great artist message, his idea emerged.

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At that point, loud and clear that these talented individuals have turned themselves into vehicles for beautiful and necessary ideas.

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To take shape.

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And how important it is still today that such messages are there in a worldly form for us and for our communities to contemplate.

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Available so we could transcend ourselves in the same way the author, the artist, the Creator, has transcended themselves.

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To give birth to them.

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So these were my final words for today. This was the 2nd episode of my commentary after reading the book art and Fear, and I have commented on the the four points that perhaps we can.

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All.

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Point at when we think of the artist dilemma. The book is called art and fear observation on the perils and rewards of art making by David Bales and Ted Orland. A A book that I obviously recommend artists to to read or students.

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Rip, thank you for being with me. I should mention that in this episode I have played the introduction of the Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin, which I'm sure you all recognise.

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And I played a piece of mine which is called Stay Still available everywhere online. So thank you for being with me and I look forward to the next episode of where is the Music podcast?

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Bye bye.