creation vs. consumption
Today, as I worked on chapbook cover designs and poems in the swine daughter series that I am realizing more and more reflect the heaviness of my mood, J was in the other room, playing a video game over Discord with his friends (the same couple we play real-time D&D occasionally). It got me pondering how, while I was invited to play provided we get another controller, I really feel like all my free time ("free" meaning not writing for money or peddling away on press/shop things) I should be writing or making art. That those slivers of time can sometimes be the most productive. While I was once quite good at Nintendo games when I was a teenager, once I started writing in earnest, my free time was for poems--both from a vocation and a hobby standpoint. I enjoy gaming as a social endeavor--board games and RPGs
This doesn't mean I didn't have other hobbies. Though I make money from it now, my visual art endeavors were once a hobby, less a profession. I have always had a maddening/productive way of turning hobbies and interests into side hustles, which at various times have included collecting vintage, jewelry making, soap making, and other crafty things. My other interests, like horror films and theater are more passive (though my dip into writing things for the stage may change that slightly.)
I used to talk to a friend about the difference between consumption and creation. How, as artists or writers, you are focused predominantly on making things. On expression and creating worlds,. While her hierarchy placed the consumers of culture lower than the creatives, I don't think its that simple. One, after all, needs to other to exist. While the audience for things doesn't always rival the people making any given thing (especially poetry--where poets often bemoan the sadness of writing only for other poets) they still need to exist for either side of it to work. There is a lot of talk about the dangers of AI, how it takes away the creative and panders to the consumer but really doesn't create anything new. Basically, every one becomes consumers but there is really nothing real to consume.
But I also think creating can come in many forms--the quote from HBC above encapsulates it perfectly. While my parents were not really artists, I think often about the ways they laid the groundwork for not one, but two children with artistic leanings. I've spoken before of the years my mother spent painting plaster figurines. Or about the surprising revelation that my dad, as a kid wrote horror stories when he was supposed to be paying attention in class. My mother also, like me, shared a love of decorating and setting the tone of a space. How my dad turned his love of betting on horses into a science and a little extra money. These were in addition to things like gardening and fishing and cooking that littered their time.
In this social media age, much becomes content, some more creative than others. Most artists balk at this word--content--to describe actual art, but then again, the lines are blurry sometimes. That which is made to sell something or inform feels like it should be different from entertainment and provocation in an artistic way. And yet, they often share similar methods and means. I know some instagram creators whose videos about daily life are as beautiful as a painting. Who have things to say with what they create. I usually don't refer to my "art" or "writing" as content (unless its freelance work for $$). But then where do things like covers and graphic design come in? Art or content? If I make a collage and then later in the day am working on a book cover design, they are pretty much the same process (though I am taking more than my own guidance since I get ideas from authors first, either directly or indirectly through the tex. ) Words are still just words, whether I am writing about vintage design or creating a whole universe in a poem.
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