The Unpredictable Service of Art
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By Mark Traphagen on February 22, 2009
Foolish Sage friend blogger Paul Burkhart recently shared this quote from an interview with poet Joe Weil:
Art is self-indulgence that, if done well, with a good grasp of the craft, and with a sense of constructive dread, ends up serving others. Of course, you can’t predict how it will serve them. . . A poet must be faithful to his or her obsessions. . . The wrong kind of self indulgence is that which puts the artist or his cause ahead of the work. Poets must be both supremely arrogant and humble. Arrogant enough to commit an act of creation. Humble enough to get out of the way of their own work, and let it be whatever it really is.
I thought the quote threw an interesting light on the theme of this blog: the way in which a creative act takes on a life of its own in a different context. Weil calls this part of the “humility” of an artist. As much as the creator might want to hold on to the created work as his/her own, and for it to bring glory to him/herself, in the end, once it gets out, it ends up serving other means for those who behold it.
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Mark Traphagen (aka Foolish Sage) is a lover of dark beers and darker music, of things that are but are not as they seem, of contexts taken out of context to become new contexts, of stories that point to a bigger Story. Mark lives in Durham, NC, with his wife and pet Macbook Pro. He has two married daughters and six grandchildren, and works by day for
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