Forget the Audience

So, I thought of another good, non-controversial topic about which to write. The audience; the people absorbing the art through their faces. They are (mostly) the reason art exists, and I am eternally grateful to anyone who has ever taken the time to listen to music I’ve recorded, come out to a show I’ve played, or read anything I’ve written, including this blog post. If you’re one of those people, I love you, and I’m truly thankful for you. It’s just that, if I want to create any type of good art that you might possibly enjoy, I have to discount your opinion entirely. I have to not worry about how you might react or what types of things you might like or dislike. There are even times when I have to actively go against those things. Why? To mis-quote Taika Waititi, “The audience doesn’t know what they want until I give it to them”. Granted, he was talking about the movie Thor: Love and Thunder when he said that, so he might not have been right in that instance, but his point stands.

Creation is a selfish act. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but it is. When I go to a band practice, I’m not doing it for you. I’m going because I love working on music with my friends. I get a thrill out of jamming, and when something sounds good to me, especially when it’s spontaneous, it is genuinely exhilarating. It’s the same with playing music in front of an audience. I’m on that stage first and foremost for me. Not the other people up there with me, and not the people watching. Art is very self-serving when you think about it like that. I practice playing bass and singing because I want to get better. I write an outline to a book because I will be excited when that book feels like it’s coming together. My own gratification is the reason I do these creative things. It has to be.

The thing is, I won’t be gratified if I don’t think what I’m doing is good. This is where artistic integrity comes into the equation. I can’t take shortcuts in getting what I want to achieve. All this really means is that I have to put in some work, and that work is the most exciting thing about creation to me. The process of working on a song with a band, practising and then performing it is the real thrill. That last part is significant because it brings in the people I was supposed to forget about. The audience.

When the audience is enthralled, challenged, feeling emotions, an artist has done their job. That might seem obvious, but the road to getting to that outcome is necessarily a twistey one. The artist has to navigate all their own quirks, assembling and combing them in new ways for each piece of art they create, and they have to be feeling something about it. The audience won’t feel it if the artist doesn’t. The artist won’t feel it if they haven’t satisfied their own artistic needs. They won’t satisfy those needs if they haven’t worked hard, and they won’t work hard if they aren’t f enjoying the entire process. It’s a weird cycle of feeling feeding into feeling, and it works exactly the same way with the audience.

The energy between the audience and the artist takes the art to stupendous peaks that it could never have reached on its own. Live music comes to mind here, of course. It happens in real time, and the feedback loop that forms is an otherworldly trip of energy and feeling. With books, the other art form to which I feel close right now, the effect is much slower, but it is still there. Books take a long time to write, and can take a long time to read if you’re anything like me. But when you’re really into a book, the vividness with which you can imagine what’s being described by the author is downright psychedelic. The only way you can get to that place while reading, is if the author got to that place while writing.

Art is for the audience, but the first audience is the artist themselves. They are creating because they love it, and it has to be for them first. The only way you’ll love it, is if they do. They have to not worry about what you might think, because they need to do what pleases themselves. The hope is that you might get the same joy out of it that they do.