Thursday! 2-33: Some Thoughts on Community.
Volume 2, Issue 33
I’ve been promising for a couple weeks now to write about artistic communities, their advantages and perils. Looks like this week is finally that week!
As it characteristic for me lately, I’m going to shorthand a lot of the positives and move straight into the cautions. Honestly, I’m not letting my pessimism drive the bus here. I think we know how many benefits we get from being part of a dynamic, interesting, engaged community of like-minded artists — especially one not focused on one main artistic pursuit. It is a grand thing to be able to hear from artists who work in media unlike our own about how they get from nothing to finished cool thing. It is wonderful to know that, most times, their journeys and ours are similar.
On the other hand, forming a community like that is hard. They take a lot of work, patience, and care. You can’t force people from diverse backgrounds and creative outlets into the same room and expect them to simply Kumbaya themselves into happy coexistence. People need time to feel each other out. More importantly, they need time to make sure the community framework you’ve built isn’t going to feel like a giant waste of time later. We need to find things that at least appear at first glance like they might make a good creative home away from home for us.
That’s what community is, really. Home away from the private home we’ve already built for ourselves. It’s the space around our immediate Inner Sanctum that we can also claim as ours — the extended home we build into which we can plant roots and grow strong against an outside world that wants nothing more than to rip us up and fling us around like debris. Our temptation is to make that community like us — an outside that looks like the inside we’ve already made. We want the people to look like us and the places to look like us. We want everyone to like us and accept us without question or hesitation. We probably want to have a good chunk of control, too. After all, if it’s our kingdom, why can’t we swing the mighty scepter?
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And there’s where all the problems begin. Community isn’t just about us and our desires. It is a place for us but not a place about us. How often have you joined a Facebook Group or a church group or a knitting club or a writing circle only to find yourself, after a few weeks, in the middle of a power struggle between a couple of people who want to be in charge. How often have you seen creative communities devolve into cliques and “cook kids” sections, become overrun with people seeking whatever spotlight they can grab, and members who think their own “way” is the only way they should ever talk about? Why even bother being part of a community if that’s how they’re going to end up?
Jerks are everywhere. Selfishness is the most fundamental human trait. Eventually, if we let people do what people do, our communities will succumb to selfish jerks who don’t care very much about everyone else and are after their own…whatever it is they want. Sometimes, they won’t even know they’re making a giant mess of things because that’s how deep selfishness runs in all of us! We see all that happening around us and we get sour on community and our fellow artists and, eventually, on our own artistic talent. Who wants to labor alone? Which of us wants to spend hours upon hours working on something we thing is cool as heck only to walk outside, hold it up to the world and hear lonely, scattered applause from a long way away? Worse, what if we hear nothing at all?
No, we crave community for the support it gives us and for the support we can put back into it (because, largely, we artists are not quite so selfish as the worst of us make us all appear). We have to be careful, though, to remember that there is no such thing at a perfect community and the one we’re in won’t be what we want if we sit back and let it go the way it “wants” to go.
Where does that leave us? Honestly, I don’t know. It seems we’re a bit stuck, doesn’t it? On one hand, we need to belong somewhere but on the other hand all the somewheres we could belong will probably let us down. Perhaps an answer is not to put so much weight on the community we’re in right now. They aren’t permanent, are they? We make them homes away from home but they aren’t actually home. We can be in one for a while and, when it’s time to go, we go. We find another one that suits us and we stay there a while. We make each one a good place for the time we are there and when it’s time for us to go — when the places don’t fit us very well and start to pinch in places they really shouldn’t pinch — we go.
The important thing — and this is the thing I want you to carry away — is that you must not let your experience in any artistic community blunt your love for your art. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever. Ever.
Ever? Never.
You are an artist. You make cool stuff. Of course your stuff can get better. Of course you are not a perfect artist. Of course a good community will help you be a better artist, will sharpen your eyes and ears and make your fingers more deft at your work. But the love you have all the way in the innermost chambers of your inner sanctum? That’s no one’s to stoke nor extinguish but yours. If the community around you tries to get into that, it’s time to go.
Better to have no community at all than to be cynical and cruel about your art. I’ll die on that hill.
What I Wrote this Week
