If there is one thing in my life that has more importance than anything else, it’s being an artist. The real question here is, what is art? And what does it mean to be an artist?A few months ago on my YouTube channel I made a video called “The scholar and the poet”, and this had to do with the two different kinds of answers you can have for every question you ask. When you give the answer of the scholar, you assess the reality, you look at it for what it is, but when you give the answer of the poet, you look beyond the reality, you see further than it. It doesn’t mean that you are being delusional, but you see facets of the reality that a person who has absolutely no artistic ability or sensitivity would not see, because things actually don’t stop where you can’t perceive them with your five senses. I gave the example of having someone that you really like and who has to leave, you will not see that person before a long time or you might never see him or her ever again, that’s the reality given by the scholar, if you are not in each other’s spaces, then you are not together at all. The poet however would see that the bound between the two persons might be too precious, too strong or too pure in order to break with the distance. Just thinking about one person would make you smile, or the knowledge that you both exist is more than enough, you are actually not far away from each other, you both exist in the universe of the other person. So, is that a lie? Is that a delusion? No, you just look beyond the reality that the scholar would give you when he would say that the distance separating you is all there is. From a certain point of view he would be right, but there is so much more, and ultimately, he is absolutely wrong. The knowledge of both answers however is important in order to be able to fully communicate with all aspects of the reality, but I digress, that’s not the subject right now.
I wanted to elaborate a bit more on this concept of looking further, because that’s for me the basic element of any form of art. Look at any art, whether you liked it or not, and see, what makes it so interesting? You are not just bound to the way things are around you, you see much more. You can apply art to so many different areas or concepts in life. When it comes to language, the purpose is to communicate. It doesn’t matter if your sentence is beautiful or not, it won’t even matter if it’s grammatically correct, because it communicates, but when you write a book or a poem, you use beauty to convey so much more meaning to these simple things called “words” would do. There are not just words, there are so much more. Let’s take the concept of movement. What is movement? It’s the change of position in space of one thing. You move your arm means that your arm is not in the same position as it used to be. Great, the scholar has just explained to you what a movement is. Now, let’s have a look at dancing, whether it’s ballet, ice skating or salsa, or anything else. They obviously all use this concept of change in space, but again, you see much more than just a change in space. A beautiful girl can become a queen in the eyes of all the men watching when she is entrancing them with what might just be called a change in space in a competition of ice skating. You see there? Movement isn’t just movement, it’s so much more. We could go on and on with examples but I think you got the idea, right?
Now, all those examples are what could be called “obvious art”. It’s obvious that poetry and ice skating are art. It’s obvious when you go to the Rijksmuseum in the beautiful city of Amsterdam that all the paintings there are art. The thing is that many people underestimate the scope of art and the fact that it permeates every aspect of our lives, whether we know it or not. If a man loves his wife and decorates her bed with flowers in the shape or a heart for Saint-Valentin, it’s art. If this woman does a simple dance movement in front of him to show how delighted and touched by the intention she is, it’s art. The simple gesture of packing a present with a beautiful paper for Christmas, is art. A lot of people on this planet are artists and underestimate this aspect of their life. You don’t have to paint a beautiful and huge painting to be an artist, you just have to, by being who you are, do simple things, that, to a greater or lesser degree, make the people around you see further than what they saw before. The examples I gave before illustrate that perfectly. I’m gonna give you a personal example. I work as a barista in a Dunkin Donuts, and while this job might be considered a shit job by anybody who only sees it as giving coffee to annoying borderline customers, it can actually be much more than that. I realized tonight why I love my job so much. Every time that I deal with new customers, I can communicate in a certain and every time different way to shape their reality and make it more beautiful than it was a few minutes before. When people go to Dunkin Donuts, they often either want coffee or donuts, not many of them go there with the idea that the barista will tell them how great it feels to contribute to their happiness and how the beauty of their smiles communicates to him through a wave in the air (I really said such things to customers). The thing is that sometimes customers stay to speak with me or my colleagues and me, or they will leave with a smile. This is art. That might sound pretentious, but nobody ever achieved anything in life by being either shy or modest about a certain situation. I just love making the customers see beyond just a donut or a coffee. This is just pure joy. I’m being an actor and myself at the same time. I’m playing the game of life and I’m making the people play as well, and that, my friends, is beyond beautiful.
The last point I wanted to talk about when it comes to art, is the quality of it. There is obviously good and bad art, like a music technically good or bad, but again, it goes beyond that. A music can be technically masterful and genius, but still be bad art in my opinion. This is obviously only my opinion here, but the intention behind the shaping of somebody else’s reality is very important to me when it comes to the quality of art. If I come back to what I said about my work as a barista, my purpose is to make people smile and be happier than they were a few minutes earlier, but I could use the same ability in order to make them feel stupid, introverted, or just to question themselves uselessly. This is not just bad for them but it would be for me too. You can modify people’s realities to make them either see more than what they saw before, or make them see less, to broaden their vision or narrow it. You can see that in all types or art. One day somebody told me that he had a lot of fun reading a book of somebody who explained how stupid and ridiculous life actually was. I don’t know you but I’m not interested in reading that book because I believed that the purpose of the artist was to narrow people’s vision, to make life and the world seem darker than they actually are. So that’s another thing. There is nothing wrong in modifying other people’s realities, in creating different realities, but it only depends on how you do it and whether your purpose is to make them see further than what they saw before or make them see less and shatter their dreams. So that’s my last point, we are all artists, but this ability that we have come with a great responsibility, use it wisel