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Why do you make art? That's the simple question Greater Good posed to seven artists. Their answers are surprising, and very various. They mention making art for fun and chance; edifice bridges between themselves and the rest of humanity; reuniting and recording fragments of thought, feeling, and retentiveness; and saying things that they can't express in whatsoever other mode.

All their answers are deeply personal. Elsewhere on Greater Good, we explore the possible cognitive and emotional benefits of the arts, and however these artists evoke a more fundamental benefit: They are but doing what they feel they're born to do.

Gina Gibney: Giving power to others

Gina Gibney's choreography has been widely presented in the Usa and Abroad. © Andrzej Olejniczak/Gina Gibney

Gina Gibney is the artistic director of the New York-based Gina Gibney Dance Company, which was founded in 1991 to serve a dual mission: to create and perform gimmicky choreography that draws upon the forcefulness and insights of women and men, and to enrich and reshape lives through programs that give voice to communities in need, especially survivors of domestic corruption and individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

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I brand art for a few reasons. In life, nosotros experience then much fragmentation of thought and feeling. For me, creating art brings things back together.

In my ain piece of work, that is truthful throughout the process. At the beginning, developing the bones raw materials for the work is deeply reflective and informative. Later, bringing those materials together into a grade—distilling and shaping movement, creating a context, working to something that feels cohesive and complete. That's incredibly powerful for me—something that really keeps me going.

Interestingly, the body of my piece of work is like a catalog of the events and thoughts of my life. For me, making work is almost like keeping a journal. Giving that to someone else—as a kind of souvenir through live performance—is the nearly meaningful aspect of my work.

Dance is a powerful fine art form for the very reason that it doesn't need to explain or comment on itself. One of the almost astonishing performances I have e'er seen in my life was of a woman—a domestic violence survivor—dancing in a tiny briefing room in a domestic violence shelter for other survivors. She was not a professional dancer. She was a woman who had faced unbelievable challenges and who was living with a great deal of sadness.  She created and performed an amazing solo—but to have described her functioning every bit "distressing" would have been to diminish what we experienced.

That'due south the ability of dance. You tin can experience something and empathize with it on a very deep level, and you don't have to put words to it.

Judy Dater: I similar expressing emotions

A portrait by Judy Dater

Judy Dater has been making photographs for more than than 40 years, and is considered one of America's foremost photographers. The recipient of a Guggenheim and many other awards, her books include Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait, Women and Other Visions, Trunk and Soul and Cycles.

I like expressing emotions—to have others feel what it is I'm feeling when I'm photographing people.

Empathy is essential to portraiture. I've done landscapes, and I think they can be very poetic and emotional, but it'due south dissimilar from the directness of photographing a person. I remember photographing people is, for me, the all-time way to evidence somebody something well-nigh themselves—either the person I photograph or the person looking—that maybe they didn't already know. Maybe information technology's presumptuous, merely that's the desire. I feel like I'm attending to people when I'1000 photographing them, and I think I understand people improve considering I've been looking at them intensely for 40-some years.

Pete Docter: It's fun making things

Pete Docter has been involved in some of Pixar Studio'due south near popular and seminal blithe features, including Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Cars, and Wall-Eastward, merely he is best known as the director of the University-Accolade-winning Monsters, Inc. Docter is currently directing Upwardly, set for release in May of 2009.

I make art primarily because I enjoy the process. Information technology's fun making things.

And I'm sure there is also that universal want to connect with other people in some fashion, to tell them virtually myself or my experiences. What I really wait for in a project is something that resonates with life every bit I see it, and speaks to our experiences as humans. That probably sounds pretty highfalutin' coming from someone who makes cartoons, merely I call back all the directors at Pixar experience the aforementioned way. Nosotros desire to entertain people, not only in the vacuous, escapist sense (though to be sure, there's a lot of that in our movies besides), but in a way that resonates with the audience as being truthful almost life—some deeper emotional experience that they recognize in their own existence. On the surface, our films are well-nigh toys, monsters, fish, or robots; at a foundational level they're about very universal things: our own struggles with mortality, loss, and defining who nosotros are in the world.

Equally filmmakers, we're pretty much cavemen sitting around the campfire telling stories, simply we utilize millions of dollars of engineering to do information technology. By telling stories, we connect with each other. We talk about ourselves, our feelings, and what it is to be homo.

Or nosotros just make cartoons. Either way we endeavor to have a good time, and we hope the audience does as well.

Harrell Fletcher: Anything anyone calls art is art

An image from "The Problem of Possible Redemption 2003," staged at the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. The video is an adaptation of James Joyce's novel Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center in Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards. © Harell Fletcher

Harrell Fletcher teaches in the art section at Portland State Academy. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Mod Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, and in numerous other museums and galleries effectually the globe. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Beloved You More, a participatory website with Miranda July, which they turned into a book, published in 2007. Fletcher is the recipient of the 2005 Alpert Laurels in Visual Arts.

The question of why I make art needs to be broken down a bit before I can answer.

First of all, what is fine art? The definition for art that I have come with, which seems to work best for me, is that anything anyone calls art is art. This comes from my belief that in that location is nothing intrinsic about art. We cannot do a chemical analysis to make up one's mind if something is art or non. Instead, I feel like calling something "fine art" is really but a subjective way of indicating value—which could be aesthetic, cultural, budgetary, and so on.

If nosotros expect at other kinds of creative activity we tin run across how various forms tin all exist and be valid at the same time. I've made what I think of equally fine art since I was a child, initially drawings, then photographs, paintings, videos, and so on. By the time I got to graduate school, I was not and then interested in making more stuff, and instead started to move into another direction, which these days is sometimes called "Social Practice."

This is sort of a disruptive term since it is so new and undefined. In a broad way, I retrieve of information technology equally the opposite of Studio Practice—making objects in isolation, to exist shown and hopefully sold in a gallery context. Most of the fine art globe operates with this Studio Exercise approach. In Social Practice, there is more of an emphasis on ideas and deportment than on objects; it tin can accept identify outside of art contexts, and at that place is oft a collaborative or participatory aspect to the work.

So back to the question why I make art. In my instance, the projects that I do let me to encounter people I wouldn't usually meet, travel to places I wouldn't normally go to, larn about subjects that I didn't know I would be interested in, and sometimes even help people out in small-scale ways that brand me feel proficient. I like to say that what I'chiliad after is to take an interesting life, and doing the piece of work that I practise every bit an artist helps me achieve that.

Kwame Dawes: An environs of empathy

© Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Kwame Dawes, Ph.D., is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of 13 books of poesy, about recently Gomer's Song, and a novel, She'southward Gone, which won the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Honour for Best First Novel.

I write in what is probably a vain endeavor to somehow control the earth in which I live, recreating it in a manner that satisfies my sense of what the world should expect like and be like.

I'm trying to capture in language the things that I run across and feel, every bit a way of recording their beauty and ability and terror, so that I can return to those things and relive them. In that way, I try to take some sense of control in a cluttered world.

I want to somehow communicate my sense of the world—that fashion of understanding, engaging, experiencing the earth—to somebody else. I want them to be transported into the world that I have created with language.

And so the ultimate aim of my writing is to create an surround of empathy, something that would permit the miracle of empathy to take place, where man beings can seem to ascension out of themselves and extend themselves into others and live within others. That has a tremendous power for the human being being. And I know this, because that is what other people's writing does to me when I read it.

James Sturm: The reasons are unimportant

James Sturm is a cartoonist and co-founder of the Heart for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. He is the writer of the all-time-selling and honour-winning graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing, called as the Best Graphic Novel of 2000 by Time magazine. In 2007, his trilogy of historical graphic novels was collected in a volume entitled James Sturm's America: God, Golden, and Golems.

I like the question "Why Do Y'all Make Art?" because it assumes what I exercise is art. A flattering assumption. The question likewise takes me back to my freshman year of college, where such questions like "What is nature?" and "Is reality a moving ridge or a circle?" were earnestly debated (normally late at nighttime and later on smoking too much weed).

Twenty-five years later I'd similar to retrieve I am a footling more clear-headed regarding this question. Mayhap the only insight I've gained is the knowledge that I have no idea and, secondly, the reasons are unimportant. Depending on my mood, on any given day, I could attribute making fine art to a high-minded impulse to connect with others or to understand the world or a narcissistic coping mechanism or a desire to be famous or therapy or as my religious discipline or to provide a sense of control or a want to give up command, etc., etc., etc.

Whatever the reason, an inner coercion exists and I go along to award this internal imperative. If I didn't, I would feel really horrible. I would be a broken man. So whether attempting to make art is noble or selfish, the fact remains that I will do it nonetheless. Annihilation by this argument is speculation. I would exist afraid that by proclaiming why I brand art would exist generating my own propaganda.

KRS-Ane: Hip hop is beyond fourth dimension, beyond space

Lawrence Krisna Parker, meliorate known past his stage proper name KRS-1, is widely considered by critics and other MCs to exist one of hip hop's almost influential figures. At the 2008 Black Entertainment Tv Awards, KRS-One was the recipient of the Lifetime Accomplishment Accolade for his rapping and activism.

I was born this fashion, born to brand art, to brand hip hop. And I recall I'1000 just 1 of the people who had the courage to stay with my built-in identity. Hip hop keeps me true to myself, keeps me man.

Hip hop is the opposite of technology. Hip hop is what the human being body does: Breaking, DJing, graffiti writing. The human torso breakdances, you tin't have that away. DJing is not technology; it'southward homo intelligence over technology: cut, mixing, scratching. Information technology's physical. The manipulation of engineering science is what humans practise, that's art.

Or take graffiti writing. Put a writing utensil in any kid's hand at age ii or three. They volition not write on a paper like they'll afterwards be socialized to do, they will write on the walls. They're but playing. That's human being. Graffiti reminds you of your humanity, when you scrawl your self-expression on the wall. Hip hop helps us to see the things in the world in new ways.

That's why hip hop has kept me young. It doesn't permit you lot to grow up as well fast. Hip hop is beyond fourth dimension, across infinite. That's why I make hip hop.

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Source: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_we_make_art

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