Pain & Suffering: do we need it to create great art?
July 18, 2007
Why is enduring pain and suffering considered a prerequisite for forming good artists and producing good art? And why, then, is it not important for a businessman to endure the same for the sake of the spreadsheets? For too long, the myth that enduring the worst life can cook up helps artists become great artists has been propagated through society. It’s just another excuse that makes it alright to treat artists, when working professionally, like subhumans while the rest of humanity goes about life comparatively unscathed.
This year, 2008, I endured the worst emotional pain of my life. I won’t go into details here but I can tell you that it was an horrendous experience. I wrote a lot of songs to pass the time. Writing them didn’t ease the pain, but making the time go by seemed to, so I occupied myself in ways that didn’t depend on heavy analysis or critical thinking (seeing as these kinds of experience make it difficult to trust the mind).
By the time the situation was resolved, I had a lot of songs and found I had written almost two albums.
But I was still living with the after-effects, a hell of melancholy, sadness and anger that persisted in interfering with normal, everyday operation. And it had not had any great, revolutionary outcome for my life or my art; I still wrote songs the same way I wrote them before. I was just dealing with a lot more scarring that came between me, my art and its successful delivery.
Painful experiences can be helpful, for those who survive them with their peronality relatively intact, in strengthening character, where and when that strength of character did not exist before. In this society, it’s one of the ways that we generally accept as valuable in creating a principled mature person, because we don’t necessarily learn these things as intrinsically valuable components of productive and meaningful living from the culture around us. It has to be taught, quite literally, the hard way. But such experience can also produce the bitter, the depressed, and assholes. So when pain is useful, it’s useful to individuals; not to artists, not writers, musicians, painters or poets. It’s useful to unprincipled people, and as NDK wrote, artists are perfectly principled when it comes to the task upon which they are engaged.
So long as the traditional industry (and society) can point to the popularly propagated idea that ‘artists must suffer’ they have a reason to keep us in the dark, abuse us, rape us of our rights and suck us dry of every dollar, every word, every melody and every stroke of the brush that lies within us. Stop this myth now. Artists do not need to suffer to produce great work.
Read NDK Creative Artist’s follow-up to this article here.
Email this article to a friend - or a nemesis, it doesn't bother us.
Subscribe now to receive notification of new Free Articulator articles like this one.
[...] article is part 2 and follows on from Joel Falconer’s original where he finished off with this… “So long as the traditional industry (and society) can [...]
[...] frequently engage in this sort of behavior. People in the industry do it too,. after all “artists should be made to suffer for their art.” Well, ‘Pfft!’ to [...]
[...] are the shadows and nightmares that take up residence in the reality of our (creative) lives. (Ref: Pain & Suffering). It becomes very hard to dream when that happens, and dreaming is our [...]