There’s a real problem with the way we talk about creativity and art, especially when it comes from people who have never tried to make it themselves. Art of every variety is frequently presented as a borderline mystical activity, as a shamanistic ritual to extract some fundamentally unknowable substance from some other world and merely capture it here on ours. Artists are treated as a different type of person entirely, like those born of special blood in a fantasy story, possessing an innately different ability to perceive reality.
Make no mistake, this is nonsense of the highest order. Art is not magic, it only appears so to people who have made no real attempt to understand it. It is not a figurative comparison to say that people who think art is magic are like Stone Age hunters seeing an airplane and assuming it’s a mystical being, because what they’re experiencing is literally the same mental process. They have mistaken a property of themselves (not knowing a thing) for a property of the art (an unknowable thing) and, in doing so, convinced themselves that because they don’t understand the art (or the process behind it), that is must not be comprehensible at all.
When we feel that we lack the faculties to comprehend something, we tend to dress it up in myth and mystery, to present it as not being something that we don’t understand, but rather something that no one can understand. Sometimes it’s merely that only those people can understand, and then we conjecture wildly about what delineates that category. School teachers do this all the time with their utterly asinine attempts to categorize students into left vs right brain, the thoroughly debunked “learning types”, or meaningless groups like “math people”. The implication is that the failure cannot be on the teacher or curriculum, but instead must be a fundamental type error, like trying to put a keyboard into a CD drive.
This has tangible effects on young people, and I was one of them. Despite my love of storytelling, there was a time when I became convinced that I was too “logical” to be a writer. When viewed in retrospect, this is obviously absurd, but it really gripped me at the time. Artists were these floating, spiritual beings, pulled about by the muses, touched by magic, ever dreaming. Art, it seemed, was a thing to be felt, a wringing of pathos onto page or canvas, a vomiting of emotion and energy. Like a prophet hearing the voice of a god; if you aren’t certain that he’s talking to you, then you must not be one of the chosen ones.
Art is not magical, nor is it a gift merely bestowed on some and not on others. “Ah, but Kyp,” you might find yourself saying, “nobody really thinks it’s magical, it’s just described that way to capture how it feels!” But when I say that art isn’t magical, I don’t just mean that it’s not a supernatural power, I mean that it isn’t magical in the metaphorical sense either. The problem with thinking of it as somehow special is that it makes it seem like something someone else can do, but fundamentally not something you can do. Once you’ve primed yourself to believe that “artist” is a type of person, you’ve separated it out from the mundane and that comes with certain implications of how it will work, what rules it follows.
Consider this: Would you ever use the term “electrician” to describe an entire group of people, whether or not those people actively work in the field at all? When someone asks why you decided to not pursue your lifelong dream of studying to become an electrician, would you answer “well, I’m not an electrician”?
Notice how circular that sounds when you swap in a “mundane” profession? You didn’t study to become an electrician because you’re not… an electrician. Well, of course you’re not an electrician if you never attempted to become one, that’s just how causality works. One is obviously not born an electrician, it’s a thing you become through gaining knowledge and developing skills just like everything else.
A pet peeve of many visual artists and musicians that I’ve met is the phrase “oh, I wish I could do what you do, but I can’t.” The statement “I can’t play the trombone” is not a statement about you fundamentally, it’s a statement about you right now. It’s a description of your current knowledge and your current skills, a collection of facts about your present state. You are making an inference that is both wildly incorrect and a bit insulting, namely that the artist in question has always been that good, rather than getting there through years of study and practice.
This is one of those beliefs that I think people can only defend if they don’t really acknowledge what they’re defending. If you simply say, “some people are just natural musicians”, it gets passively absorbed by people as “one of those things about the world that is true”. But break that statement down into what it actually means, and what are you left with? What does “musicians” mean in this context? Surely it means “someone who has the skills and knowledge to play an instrument (or sing, or compose) well”. Are you genuinely proposing that they emerged from the womb already knowing how to play the piano? Or is it more likely that what you’ve mistaken for innate ability is really just that they have learned it more easily than you believe you would have?
“Well, come on, that’s what we’re actually saying, isn’t it?”
I don’t think it is, really. When pressed, perhaps people will walk back their belief to “some people have an easier time becoming skilled at X”. But these same people are still making and justifying decisions as though what they really believe is that a box is checked when they’re born and they’re either an artist or they’re not. If it’s merely that they think that some people will learn faster than others, that would be so trivially true as to not be worth stating at all.
The reality is, for a truly average person, it’s possible to become quite good at almost anything given enough time and effort. The obvious exception is unalterable physical limitations in activities that are >90% physical ability. Even in things that require some physical component, while your lack of physical ability might prevent you from being in the top 100 people in the world, it almost certainly doesn’t prevent you from the top 1% as long as you are willing to work harder on skills and knowledge. You’re not obligated to pursue any particular skill, artistic or otherwise, but you can’t rely on the notion that you fundamentally are unable to do it. And that’s not even a bad thing. We all have limited time and energy and choosing to not commit to becoming great at a specific thing is okay. But ultimately, it’s a question of what you want, not of what you’re capable of.
Resist the urge you may have to reframe this issue in such a way that you can continue to say “no, I’m just fundamentally incapable of being good at that thing.” Instead ask yourself why you would even want that to be true. That you are able to become a very good painter with enough study and practice does not mean you are obligated to do so. It doesn’t even mean you should in some greater moral sense. It merely means that you cannot pretend that it was never your decision as a way to excuse yourself from the responsibility of making the choice.
What’s lost in our elevation of art to the magical level is that its beauty is derived from the fact that is real. The wonder of art is directly derived from the real world, not from some mysterious aether floating outside normal perception. This is true whether or not the subject of the art has ever existed, as I’ll expand on later. So, don’t get fooled by this idea that you are not able to create art. You may just not be able to yet.