Any new work has manifold possibilities when it is still taking form. It can go anywhere as long as you are still working on it, shaping matter–sound–to reflect something intangible. But once you are done, it only has one possibility: what it is. It can be interpreted many ways, but can no longer add anything to the discussion.
In my understanding, this was why Socrates refused to write anything down. In his view dialogues were living things, and once complete, they were dead and gone. They were also all completely unique.
Specifically, I was thinking about my own ideas, and my own critical engagement with them. Perhaps with a bit of vanity, I view them as my own “art”, in the sense that I am constantly endeavoring to perceive (and no doubt sometimes create) patterns which were hitherto unmanifest, latent.
And I was thinking that once they are out there, once I hit Publish, I have no more emotional attachment to them than if they were someone else’s.
The magic of art–any creative form which involves in part spontaneity and creative engagement with something or someone–is in ELICITATION. You are trying to bring out inchoate patterns, and necessarily such patterns can only be those which can find a home within you. Thus, you are eliciting some higher form of awareness.
This in my view is the proper purpose of art. I have made this rough point many ways, many times. The UTILITY of art is as a tool for personal growth by offering up a means, a pathway, for bringing up latent awareness, and for processing it–mourning it, accepting it, playing with it.
Van Gogh is dead. So is his art EXCEPT to the extent that he offers other artists a chance to see their own worlds in a new way. His work should not be fetishized in a manner quite similar to the tribal cults from which we get that word.
I have always liked, and spoken often of, the Tibetan practice of creating temporary art, art they invest an ENORMOUS amount of care and time in creating, which they value for a time, then destroy. This is not just a lesson in impermanence and the rejection of attachment, but also in my view a wise understanding that what is dead should be buried–ceremoniously, of course–but buried.
If I extend this metaphor slightly farther, are the works of art in museums zombies? Are they reflections of life past, but denuded of the creative spark which animated the PEOPLE whose lives were shaped by their creative output?
Frankly, I don’t know if the previous paragraph makes sense. I don’t understand it. I am operating symbolically in a fishing trip for something interesting. If you can pull it out of the water, have at it. Then throw it back.