A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Influencer
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It has been noted lately that the stereotype of the addicted, destitute, tortured degenerate artist cannot exist any longer; the poet must now be a master of self-improvement, and be a role model to those who would listen to them. The internet is awash now with influencers and gurus promoting particular lifestyles – usually quote-unquote healthy ones – and brands for the purposes of self-promotion or direct commercial profit. All the cool rock stars are dead or have undergone rehab for their various mental illnesses. Rock stars were always envied for their lifestyles, but it is no longer viable to simply be a Rockstar – one must be a hustler-mindset, content-creating, social media savvy entrepreneur, who routinises and micro-manages every aspect of their lifestyle for maximum efficiency, productivity and well-being.
Art has always been about self-expression. It is the very point of it, to capture some element of life and the feeling of living through the purposeful construction of objects out of materials harvested from the world, or in the case of live performance, simply living and existing in a particular way. Now that everyone has their own social media account – their own artistic space – it must be used to provide commentary for the art itself. The benefits are enormous – the work can in theory reach any single person on earth. Such a relationship is for the benefit of creator and consumer. But in order to do this, the consumer no longer is willing for the work to stand for itself. They must know who the creator is.
The underlying message is: who will I be if I consume this work? The implication is that you will turn out like the artists, so choose your artist wisely. And if the artist doesn’t live an aspirational lifestyle, then the audience will find someone they do want to be like, often owing to who has a diet consisting of the exact arrangement and ratios of fruit, vegetables, meats (or meat substitutes) that the consumer prefers themselves. The work is secondary.
There is a reversal too, where now it is seen as a necessary component and compliment of being well-known, that you share your ‘mental health journey’, which is really just a reverse-pathologized and commoditised way of saying “life story”. The rock star is not allowed to rock out anymore, because they are expected to have undergone a mental health transformation by the age of 21, or 25, or 30, which becomes part of their own commercial brand – or more likely – someone else’s (maybe this is why we’ve seen a complete death of rock music in popular culture?).
If they have not resolved their problems, then people don’t want to hear from them. Their art and work is not allowed to speak for itself anymore, and they are not allowed to crawl back into bed or under the rock from which they came at night; they are expected to tog out for a fun run at the weekend or to promote a local children’s charity.
The worlds of artist and entrepreneur have been blurred, partly by opportunity, partly by coerced necessity. People don’t want to hear from artists if they’re not also successful entrepreneurs; nobody wants to hear from the business-person who doesn’t have a highly efficient, optimised routine (with instructional material for sale on how to emulate their success).
Eventually what’s made me step back during all this and think that maybe yes, the world is insane and does need to change, is the realisation that we live in a world where no-one has hobbies because everyone’s hooked to devices for their few free hours a day, and the ones that aren’t spent carrying out basic activities of daily living are spent engaging in physical workouts and corrective exercises just to maintain physical and mental health due to our impotence-inducing lifestyles.
The people who do have hobbies – creative or otherwise – are forced to monetise them and they become known as ‘side hustles’ – these are addendums and appendices to their 9-5’s that ideally provide a supplementary income, because ‘real’ jobs – which are often the most unreal, surreal and valueless aspects of people’s lives – don’t enable them to afford basic necessities such as rent and food in the environments immediately surrounding the places where the jobs are done.
What was once perceived in the past to be normal functioning is now branded as mental health and is seen as a special interest, which not everyone is interested in or able to pursue. Escapism is a luxury, (even though it’s a necessity) and then you have to turn it into monetizable content and sell an aspirational lifestyle just so people will follow you and maybe buy something you’ve created.
It might seem like this is the basis of my own blog and writing, and to an extent, it is. The yoga classes and the meditation retreats and the marathons. The travel experiences and so on. I don’t write about these things because I am selling some journey of transformation – I simply don’t have anything else to write about.
But it’s also the case that I could never be a tortured artist. I would never have put pen to paper in the first place, or for the first time since school, without forcing myself to first find some measure of mental and physical fitness. It started with a bit of running, going to the gym, revisiting the swimming pool and so on. I only really started writing when I was living in Vietnam, and so I kind of inevitably decided to make myself a travel writer.
The fact is I don’t even understand the trope of the tortured, mentally unwell artist. The reason I’m interested in well-being and why it’s so inextricably linked up to my writing, is that I need to be physically and mentally healthy to write. I’d never have had the wherewithal or focus or discipline to sit down and write, nor even the emotional security to transcribe an honest thought from my mind to a piece of paper or a laptop, if I didn’t have some measure of physical and mental health. It doesn’t have to be writing – it’s whatever it is you want to do but can’t find the time, or don’t believe you’re able to do it, or whatever other excuses you might have.
I have good days and less than good days, still, though it’s far too easy to make excuses not to work on less than good days; it is the long runs and the surfing and mental challenge of practicing something difficult that inspires creativity in me in the first place. Writing to me is an exercise in mental (and often physical) discipline, and so it goes in the same box as all the other ones I’ve been interested in over the years.
So this is why I write about travel and well-being – if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have anything else to write about. I’d never have written anything in the first place. In any case, once you’ve uncovered a bit of life on your own terms, you realise that nothing of what you really have to say is governed by the things around you. Exotic places, healthy activities, adventurous sports, they are just vehicles. It's all just self-expression. I’ve written about places I’ve been and things I’ve done.
The more places I’ve gone, and things I’ve done, the more I’ve written, and the more I’ve written the more things I’ve done. This cycle repeats until eventually you find yourself right back where you started, and then you realised that you can write about literally anything. There is no further need to go anywhere or do anything, but once you discover that, you’re free to create whatever it is that you want.
But also we have reached a peak in consumerism, where it is evident that a lot of it is killing us and those around us, not just our bodies through products but our minds through information and non-stop stimulation. People can’t take any more, and there has been – and will be far more – a greater appreciation for creation and creativity. Like I said, I never realised I could create anything until I’d cleared a lot of mental fog from a lifetime of mindless consumption. People don’t want to stay in hotels now, they want to build their own campervan; they are fed up with reading institutional media and have realised they would rather create their own.
The tortured artist is a self-fulfilling prophet though. He sees misery and projects it onto the world, and then creates more miserable art from what is reflected back to him. But so too is the celebratory artist. If you create the opposite of misery, then you might see it reflected back to you too. To dwell too much on the woes of the past is to project a miserable future.
There must equally be a projection of the future, for creativity is not just about putting paint or words on a paper, or even blocks in a foundation or a wall. These things don’t simply speak for themselves, they become part of the fabric of the society they depict. The world has collapsed and so now every work of art, and every attached social media caption and commentary becomes part of the new world it would represent, projecting it into the future.
The past has disappeared, it is a bridge being burned as the cavalry marches on to new lands. And the future is a blank canvas, onto which every piece of creative work, every comment in the underlying thread, even every conversation held between two human beings – whether recorded by phone or not, intentionally filmed or surreptitiously surveilled – becomes part of the new period of history about to be explored and created as we go along. The depictions of the world of the future can be positive or negative – which would you rather it be?
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