Dear Writer,
Yesterday, I defined everything that we create, even the stuff that meets a basic human need without any attention to beauty, as art.
Some of you might feel some pushback on that, and I get it. You might say, “So, by your definition, a toilet flange is art?”
Yep.
Let’s run back to the good ol’ Merriam Webster, which says that art is “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects.”
Note, it says “especially in the production of aesthetic objects.” It doesn’t say, “only in the production of aesthetic objects.”
Toilet flanges and laundry detergent and reusable shopping bags and everything in the world that isn’t naturally occurring is human fucking imagination made manifest. Your toilet flange generates meaning in that someone thought of a mechanism that could move your least pleasant human excretions out of your house and now that thing exists in your daily life because someone thought it could.
A thing did not exist. Someone imagined a thing. And then they made a thing exist. That’s not just art. That’s magic.
Whatever you do, you are creative. You create things, experiences, beauty, function. What you create is important. It matters.
Everything,
L