Recent exposures to new artists (local and foreign) have led me to explore more liberal ideas about Art (and my art) in general. One artist in particular, whom I met two weeks ago, (one who, in my opinion, makes art not for money but simply and purely for "Art's sake,") has made me realize, through her art, that the normal boundaries I've come to assimilate exist only in my head. The given parameter though is, I am assuming, that I have already transcended my art as merely being one form of catharsis.
In this, a perspective about art which I have always been faced with, something I dare not acknowledge as an original idea but only as a renewed realization of late, has brought me again to negotiate the idea of Art as Life and Life as Art. To expound on this: I believe in practicing one's own preaching, that in his/her art (painting, poetry, music, etc.), one's philosophy, artistic sensibility, aesthetics, and poetics should ultimately reflect his/her own way of life and vice versa.
Even in an imagined world, values are very much drawn from each of our personal experiences, if not from the witnessing of the real. Empathy, and not sympathy, is what I intend to champion here. And, art created/authored in a voyeuristic or pedestrian point of view only aspires to appease or glorify one's vanity - as if to purge some need to say that he/she has done one good thing in his/her life by means of promoting and propagating a messianic concept of morals through his/her art.
The greater challenge, I suppose, is to live one's art. Be a practitioner and not only an advocate. In whatever art form through which you present your "advocacy" (humanitarian, environmental, social, etc.), be the person who makes the first step.
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