A Selfless Art, Update #2
It seems that, without admitting it to myself, I’ve accepted a target of writing 1,500 words every day. So far, that’s what I’ve done, but it’s not sustainable. Life has other plans. There are people I need to care for, and more tiresome obligations I can’t put off. There will be days in the coming months when I don’t write anything at all.
It’s been an easy start because, so far, I’m writing about my own experience and the material is familiar. I rarely need to check facts (though I did read about the 1984 Miners’ Strike yesterday). The first chapter of A Selfless Art seems to require me to account for myself, which is surprising given the title. I know where I’m going with this, but not yet whether I can get there. My paradoxical idea is that the only way to shed my self is to pass through it to somewhere it no longer matters. Put like that, it must be hard to grasp. Time will tell whether I can make it clearer by writing it.
That’s why I found myself writing that this wasn’t history or even memoir but philosophy. It was intimidating to see myself boldly make such an ambitious claim. And yet I want to stand by it. If philosophy involves thinking about how and why to live, than it’s what I’ve spent much of my life doing. And those moral questions are a consistent thread running through my work and writing. How and why do we co-create art? The full title of this book is A Selfless Art, The Ethics of Co-Creation.
But I’m using philosophy as I use art—to signify an act with particular intentions. In the case of art, that act is about creating and sharing meaning through a particular set of resources (as described in Chapter Two of A Restless Art). In philosophy, the act is concerned with understanding reality to better guide action. But an act is not its performance. In Western culture, ideas like art and philosophy have acquired a false status, as being good in themselves. They are no such thing. There is no end of bad art and bad philosophy, produced by people working without craft or care or simply with bad ideas. And yes, I know the questionability of judgement. It too is an act in the world. It too can be good or bad. And we are accountable for our acts.
To say that A Selfless Art is concerned with philosophy is just a statement about my intention. Whether that philosophy has any value, whether it is well thought and useful, remains to be seen.
François Matarasso 