The Role of the Artist
Much like the shaman, we walk between worlds...
Some thoughts inspired by conversations with fellow Creators, as well as recent mean-spirited commentary from Destroyers:
Every artist I know describes their art as coming from another dimension.
Many artists report receiving their best ideas (& sometimes fully-formed works!) in dreams, meditations, trips & ecstatic states.
There's a shamanic essence to their descriptions of the Creation process, as if they straddle 2 worlds at once & their art is an attempt to communicate to This World what they experience in the highly symbolic & psychedelic environment of The Other World 🌎 🌉 🌏
The "altered state of consciousness" in these cases might more accurately be called The Zero Point. As any chaos magician (hi 🙃) will tell you, the Zero Point — or, the liminal space where you have no identity & no narrative — is the origin of all Creation.
The Zero Point is called such because it is the emptiness, the formlessness, the Void in which all possibilities preside & from which all Creation springs forth 🥚
The Artist, who regularly accesses this Void, essentially sacrifices their temporal sense of self in exchange for these glimpses from God's perspective.
This is why Art (& not just any "art" but ART ~ the kind that stirs the soul and in-spires [breathes life into] the audience) is so timeless & universally resonant. 🌌
But the price the Artist pays for surrendering their tiny-"i" identity in order to embody the Universal I AM, is that they become something like a big blank projector screen for critics to project all their nasty, vile, depraved shit onto 📽
The critic may not know this but he is an Artist too — confessing his sordid Inner state by the ugly colors with which he graffiti's his rage onto another's Art, attempting to vandalize it... or by the hateful words with which he poetically writes his critiques.
Said simply: Art reveals the "I AM" of the Artist.
And we are all Artists, perpetually Creating in exact accordance with our embodiment of Universal consciousness.
So if you want to know who someone is, remember this: