I have been on a kick of ADHD over-correction recently, and when I am in this mood I find myself trying to optimise, to work out how to be more productive or organised where it is not even really needed. Recent online travels have introduced me to a new adage. ‘Create more than you consume!’ it advises, and originally I listened, but now I am sceptical of its origin and ultimate goal.
For many, ‘consumption’ is a byword for ‘fandom’. From this angle it makes perfect sense to create more than you consume, because Internet fandom stunts young people and the free creation of their art. We do not learn how to be influenced by something, we simply learn how to continue its tradition with little-to-no space for personal reflection or aesthetic synthesis.
Fans swear themselves in belonging to one or two isolated cultural products - one series of books, one band, one film. I always wondered why the actual verbal expression of uncritical fandom made me feel so uncomfortable, to the point of cringing at Harry Potter references in polite society beyond apparent reason - it springs from a sense of total isolation, the part at the expense of the whole, the micro-equivalent of the ultimate spoilt stereotype, an American never needing to learn of anything beyond America. No recognition is made of the great web of influence spun from all human culture, our one commonality.
Social media incentivises fanart, the fetishisation of someone else’s subject. An artist who must resort to social media for marketing purposes is an artist robbed of an artistic essential. My own visual art got much better when I ditched Instagram and became addicted to Pinterest instead. Suddenly I had the capacity to explore my own trails of thought, to take and take from another person and be justified in doing so without needing any overt representation of that person’s face or body, any overt advertisement of look I am an artist drawing a celebrity! Your favourite celebrity!
I love the A Level and GCSE art curricula in the UK, because in order to get a good grade you have to develop a sort of visual equivalent to the university essay - find four or five working artists, study them in context, work out what they are saying to you, extrapolate visuals and techniques to create a meaningful answer. It is impossible to excel if you do not pay as much attention to the work of these artist-companions as you do to your own. This silent dialogue should be the basis of education in every discipline everywhere. Art springs from dialogue in word, image, sound. Art can be a conversation with someone from a thousand years ago or it can be a conversation with a friend.
People diss canons for preserving the status quo, but it is a good thing that they exist - they help us to take in the links which join together all great works of art. Virgil could not have written The Aeneid without reading, probably memorising, the Iliad. A minor character is plucked from the Iliad and sent on his own adventure, and thus what we are reading is, on a technicality, fanfiction - but the really noteworthy parts are all style, aesthetics, meter, bloodshed. Violent reactions, minor revolutions, are encoded in the canon too: without any record of the esteemed painters, Duchamp’s urinal would make no sense.
In the act of consumption - when discerning, controlled, connected - you foster a meaningful lifeworld of your own, a Petri dish for imagination in adulthood’s forcefully sterile kingdom. In the real world, you cannot meaningfully separate creation and consumption - they exist, by design, hand-in-hand.