marc pietrzykowski > poetry/fiction/lit type stuff
Muse Baiting
I’m still, and will likely forever be, puzzled about the “why” of making art. Observing art, participating in another’s work, seems much more clear, an act of co-creation that pierces human isolation, connects us the way a good conversation or fight or hug or love-making session does… but making art is not the same experience, at least not for me, it’s more like broadcasting bits of experience for someone else to converse with, shooting radio waves into space. In a social and historical sense, I guess an artist is in conversation with both their predecessors and their peers, though I do think too much contemporary art of all kinds is focused on the current chatter, the easily accessed chorus of voices inching toward and away from a representative style–this is a very broad generalization, I know, and I am thinking more of poetry and prose and music than I am of plastic arts, but anyway–too much cloud thought and decision by committee and not enough listening for voices in the wind, or speaking from musty corners of history. I suspect it has been the case for some time, at least for the last few centuries in Western art, that for the great bulk of artists the salon is…
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