10/01/26 Daily Video: Good art is vulnerable art.
Making art is incredibly vulnerable. It has to be; your emotion and experience fuel it. So how do you know if your art is any good? If a human responded—and that includes you.
Making art is incredibly vulnerable. It has to be; your emotion and experience fuel it.
So how do you know if your art is any good? If a human responded—and that includes you.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back, creatives.
Ruthanne Reid, author and stroke survivor, here to help you get unblocked
and into a daily habit of creation.
Speaking of creation, do you love it?
Was there a time when you loved it?
Was there a time in your life when you could make a thing and
look at it and go, "I made this!" and
just experience joy?
For some of you, it may have been a really long time since you felt that.
The world likes you to think that your art doesn't count unless,
somehow, you're famous or rich or the best.
That's awful.
That is dehumanization.
That is saying that you, as a person, don't matter unless you're a billionaire.
What?
It is an incredibly unhealthy thing to think
that your art doesn't matter unless it's on the
big screen or super famous.
I know we've been fed that.
We've all been fed that.
But the only thing that accomplishes is stopping you from creating
because you're not the billionaire of artists.
You are not the big famous whatever, and you're probably not going to
be because you weren't born into a certain family, you don't have hereditary
wealth, whatever it is.
So why do they tell you this?
Well, (a) because the people who do make it are actually
making money for those guys, like, your
average best selling author gets maybe
15% of the cover sale.
So they're only going to bet on things that they think they can make money on.
That has nothing to do with whether your art is any good.
How do you know art is good?
Well, did a human actually get moved while reading it?
Did a human laugh at that joke?
Did a human sing along with you?
Did a human look at the pattern that you sewed and went, oh, that is a gorgeous,
gorgeous pattern?
If a human responds to it and likes it, and that includes
you, then it is worthy art.
Art is taking all of the things that you are—victories,
defeata, successes, the soufflés that rose in the soufflés
that failed, all of it—and putting it onto the page.
Now, the page may not be souffles that rose and souffles
that fail, but you see, it incorporates everything that you went through.
Your learning experience, your emotions, the ups, the downs, all of it.
That's what makes your art real: real emotion.
But when you are affected by art, it matters.
And other people will be affected by yours, I
know that because you are human and they are human.
It is a tuning fork principle. Someone out there
will resonate with what you make.
You can find joy and enthusiasm in your work.
It's not over.
Sit down with me,
and together, with determination,
let's make something new.