The Artist's Laziness

To be an artist is to be lazy. This laziness is borne, in part, from fear, fear of producing something worthless, invisible, unlikable, bad, or even worse, mediocre. But I think that this laziness to produce also comes from one’s lack of any kind of instruction manual on how to be an artist. The normative guide book to living seemed to have been inscribed on the tablets of our souls: most of us have entered this world believing that to earn a living is optimal human modus operandi, and that all the things that follow from earning, is the goal. Living, i.e. being, is much easier when we have manual to refer to and precedents to emulate.

I suppose the way to overcome this laziness is to cultivate one’s sense of himself as something other than a doer, but instead as a creator. How things would change for us once we think of ourselves as First Creator, as primum mobile, prime mover of… who knows what? And that’s the beauty of it: and then there was art.

And the only way to cultivate one’s sense of himself as creator is just to create and to keep creating.