(bad) art

who makes the rules?

Today, I opened Facebook after a long, long time and stumbled upon an old Percy Jackson fandom group. Much like most other Facebook pages, it has turned into a dumping ground for mishmash posts and random memes with no relevance to the group's purpose whatsoever. Crazy to think that we were so obsessed with this platform once, no?

But here’s what caught my eye: A poem by (insert a well-known modern poet). Captioned as “cringe poetry”. The poster talked about how modern poetry defied all standard poetry rules and how Instagram poetry was absolute “cringe”. Most comments echoed the sentiment.

But I know people who adore the poet’s poems. I know people who adore them so much so that they made it their keepsake by getting those words inked, for life.

What is "cringe poetry," then? And what makes it “cringe”?

Is it the deviation from the “standard rules”, or is it its wide appeal to a mass audience— many of those who have never heard of Rilke or Keats?

Photo by Rabah Al Shammary on Unsplash

When I attempt to draw or paint, I almost always end up with a pathetic creation. What I picture in my head doesn’t translate well onto paper. The margins of my notebooks are strewn with poorly doodled creatures, hapless-looking cats and disastrous, tormented flowers.

Give a kid a crayon, and they will create something – on paper, on the desk, on the wall.

In his book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong says that his uneducated mother found beauty in her bleak everyday life – a tiny bird, a flower, a lace curtain at Walmart, a cheap plastic ring at a roadside shop.

Even though she neither had the time nor the energy to make something of her emotions, she found beauty when she saw it.

In George Orwell’s ghoulishly dystopian world of 1984, Winston Smith breaks rules for what? For a useless piece of antique glass because he finds it beautiful.

There’s a book I read when I was in school. It’s called Hana’s Suitcase. It’s about this Japanese school teacher’s quest to find the owner of an old suitcase in a museum; a 12-year-old victim of the Holocaust, her name was Hana Brady.

In her gloomy, plague-infested, death-scented camp, Hana created art. With a small, broken piece of pencil, she drew pictures of her train journey to the camp, of the train itself, chugging past towering trees and vibrant meadows. Torn away from her home and her family, Hana found solace in art.

I believe we are wired to create and appreciate art, look for beauty.

Without art, we’re not human. Without creating, we’re no longer human.

Art and creativity are as old as our time on the planet.

Think of the Lascaux Cave art, tucked away somewhere in the French countryside. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green writes about how this little time capsule of art was accidentally discovered by a group of teenage boys. A fascinating story.

So, the dark, ancient caves, not even all that large, are home to almost two thousand paintings made by grown adult humans from the Palaeolithic Age. Interestingly, there are also hand stencils on the walls, much like the way kids trace their palms on paper today.

Why did they do it? Because of their innate humanness. I’m sure we all have. Why do we, as kids, still do it? Because of our innate humanness. As for the real “purpose” behind the creation, I don’t believe it serves any purpose.

I love what John Green had to say about it. There’s no purpose, except the person who drew it saying, “I was here.”

Acknowledging their existence, almost subconsciously trying to make sense of it. No other purpose, really. That’s its purpose.

The purpose of creativity is to acknowledge life. The purpose of art is to celebrate it.

Oscar Wilde once said that the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely, and that all art is quite useless.

Well, yes, much like life and dying. But we make art, we live, and die, and we will continue to do so if we are to remain human.

Who set the rules of art, anyway? When you create something “just because,” you are an artist. Good or bad is a matter of taste.

This brings me to the strange obsession with stuff that is “cringe”. When we come across a cringeworthy piece of content, our first thought is probably how stupid and bad it is. But, many a time (more often than we’d wanna admit) we go back to watching it again, at least once. And we share it for a good laugh, if not for anything else, and it goes viral. And then we wonder why.

Here’s the psychology, according to this article: We cringe, because it’s them, and not us. You may not realise it consciously, but cringe content can make you think about yourself. You might imagine being in someone else's shoes and think about what you would do, even if it seems embarrassing. This can help you become more aware of how you act, the choices you make, and what you care about. When the creator comes across as awkward, it also makes us face our own embarrassing moments and quirks. Subconsciously.

We’re probably someone’s art, too. Misshapen and cringe, probably; but art.

A random comment under a YouTube video once made me realise how the meaning of “art” will never be exhaustive. A young girl plucking a flower and pinning it in her hair is art. A silly joke in the middle of a mind-numbing conversation is art. Finding faces in chipped wall paint is art. An epiphany while admiring a lovely sunset with your lover is art.

When we try to create art that everyone will like, we're not being true to ourselves. Instead, we're trying to shield ourselves from vulnerability and the risk of making art that some people might not enjoy.

Art is accessible and has probably always been the most accessible human thing in every corner of this world. No amount of elitist art galleries or rule-setting societies can make it exclusive in its true sense, and that is its beauty — its humanness.

So, create good art, create bad art, create awful art. And put it out there, like that Palaeolithic hunter did back then, in the cave.

He was there, and we are here. Now. And it’s cheaper than therapy.

Create, for it’s the one human thing nobody can take away from us, like, ever.

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What are you inspired to create today? :)

With Love,

Jhelum