Subservient to no one

Those successful creatives in the world will know this (and by 'successful' I do not mean 'famous' nor 'wealthy'). Infecting like a cancer upon all creative pursuits, be it art or writing or anything else, the pedant works to elicit her unique from of mundanity. A particularity to exactitude is not pedantry; an eagerness to get things right is no bad thing. Pedantry is the drudgery of pseudo-creativity, the compulsion to the arbitrary, the adherence to grammar that sees a person forsake true self expression for the bland security of correctness. Those who are cursed with creative ineptitude, who cannot create with originality, must substitute their wanting talents with the tedium of pedantry. All creative realms have their pedants; whether painters who insist on 'correct' ways to apply liquid colour to a surface, or writers who question syntax and accurate word usage. The pedant will not save you. You will never create great art looking through t...

I have probably written about this before, sure. I use this blog to indulge in those backstreet notions that lead to no place remarkable, or notions that simply peter out into loose gravel across sandy avenues where bare feet tear on broken glass. Is it not the case that true revolutionary art, or truly meaningful art, can only be hand made? Anything grander must be only upheld by money and I can think of few occasions where wealth supports the revolutionary. It is those moments of self-motivated creation that an artist truly creates, and truly dissents. Give me a million pounds and I will make you a fine art piece involving skills and precious commodities, the piece realised through the acquiring of materials and the hiring of talents. When art is created from one's own motivations, one's own funding, it cannot be so grand. It can only be smaller, less accomplished. Home made art becomes a question of fast or slow: fast and roughly made; or slow and carefully mad...

The flaw inherent to all TV art competitions is the absence of the Nasty Judge: the Simon Cowell -like figure, suitably deficient in empathy to render every deluded hobbyist entrant to a quivering mound of heaving rejection; to satisfy our own hateful needs, to successfully trash the dream of the deluded, to sour the optimism of those who dare to hold aspirations. Is this not the only thing that could make such lousy television worth watching? It is apparent art is so revered in the minds of TV producers they dare not reduce art criticism to the humiliation of the X-factor format. Channel 4 once attempted an X-factor-style art show which resulted in continual fervent adoration from Tracy Emin for the eventual winner while Matthew Collings exercised his trademark non-committance (lest his ventured opinion offends one of his art world chums, I assume). The BBC's effort demonstrations either their feigned impartiality or their feigned left-wing stance by ensuring only ban...