Art never supports the cause. It never exposes sin or calls out evil. It never tries to teach. The craft used to do these things is propaganda, not art.

Art never tries to “make you think.” On the contrary, like Yoga, art stops thought.

The artist doesn’t try to save humanity, or even correct it, because the artist has no love for political abstractions. Rather, the artist loves actual humans, in all their messiness.

The artist declines when Plato offers them a conditional return to the republic. The artist doesn’t speak for the republic, including the republic inside the artist’s own head.

The artist has no voice. The propagandist has a voice. What we might call Chekhov’s voice, for example, would only have eluded and mystified Chekhov.

Also, art is never “for art’s sake.”

Art is a reminder that we exist. That we are. You are. I am. This is the most profound of all truths. It is Aristotle’s, and then Shakespeare’s, “to be or not to be.” This is art’s purpose, a calling up of consciousness: I am.

This was God’s answer when Moses asked his name. This is Hinduism’s rasa. This is Plato’s possession, a “light and winged and holy thing,” out of its mind. It is wildness, the most desired of all things, and the most feared. Art is never safe.

It is arrived at by way of Shakespeare’s non sanz droict, meaning the artist stops trying to appeal to arts institutions, academics, activists, and politicians. It is arrived at by way of Keats’ negative capability, meaning the artist stops trying to control the audience. It is arrived at by way of Coleridge’s laxis effertur habenis and Laozi’s wu wei, meaning the artist stops trying to control the art.

The artist must be consistently engaged in creation–permanently interested, as Emerson put it. And what is created must be a surprise, leaving the artist “stupid with wonder.”

Artists must create in a state of vulnerability, letting go of everything that keeps them safe, from the way they stand to what they know to be true. The final barrier to that vulnerability is what the artist knows about making art, the technique itself. This too must be let go.

Art is letting go. And in these moments of being untethered, whether artist or audience, we are confronted by our own consciousness.

Javen Tanner, November 2024