Member-only story
I have a great deal of contempt for people who call themselves artists, while secretly preferring bourgeoisie comfort, propriety, and indeed, anxiety; in other words — most urban-dwelling young people. The behavior is remarkably consistent: creative projects are speculated upon, begun, abandoned, strewn with salt, over and over again. At 30, I look back on the people I met in my 20s and think: what was it all for? With very little exception, the answer is — for nothing, for the sake of saying we were productive, for the sake of reifying the art-schoolish image we had of ourselves as ‘creative’. It is no wonder our cultural discourse has replaced the word ‘artist’ — a word which implies technique and tradition — with ‘creative’ — a word that implies an amorphous kind of activity.
