[Pu the Owl]

You talk about music in particular way because that is a subject that interests you more than any other. But if you look at it, it's the same for other arts as well. Just think about figurative arts, leaving aside films and videogames - even if as you sort of said yourself, this applies to them too - not because they are multimedia but because with those the question is a little different, being both the the work of a team most of the time, not of a single person, and also as they necessarily involve considerable amounts of money as an element of the creative process. But that's another story.

From a point on during the last century art has become complicated. Artists didn't feel the boundaries of traditional art were representative enough of modern sensibility, so there was a bit of a ruckus about what a decent artist should be doing with his art. Being too traditional wasn't apt anymore. You could - and had to - do all sorts of things, mix all sorts of media, decompose the image or simplify it or just skip the part where you had to paint a something recognizable. Some artists didn't even bother to paint at all, they just cut a canvas into slices and found a smart art dealer. Like in the film we watched the other day, Achilles and the Tortoise. Wasn't the man in the film creative? He was, no question about it. And despite what the dealer though he wasn't worse than many other painters he was exposing in his gallery. But to be a decent artist you have to be something more than merely creative, because if you leave creativity alone or you cannot direct it toward something, it will probably just produce, in the best cases, something "pretty" or "stunning". It will be all mannerism with nothing solid to back it up. Nothing wrong with it, but truly great artists can do better than that.

You see, I have a problem with contemporary art, because most of it just seems to mean nothing at all and to find glory in it. Once the groundbreaking effect wears off or once this has been done once or twice, what's left of the artist's will to create instead of impress? An artist shouldn't be at all costs worried about the effect on the audience and push creativity toward the absurdities we see more than often nowadays. The artist isn't a clown and creativity should be his own need, not the audience's. Isn't that the same with music? A few artists - hats off - can do crazy things and be truly original with their creativity, but others are just riding the train of a successful idea. In the end I think many artists, in order to achieve at any cost originality, sell out their own creative intuitions, their inspiration, and don't have a clue about what they're really doing. But another problem we have with the arts nowadays is everybody can invent a theory after the artwork instead of working with a purpose to achieve something that will represent a theory you had from the start. So basically you can justify anything you do if you have a good way with words or if you can advertise it so that it will sell.