Too Personal

I am coming into contact with an issue that many artists likely face once they start to make enough work, but I shall discuss it anyhow.

Art is autobiographical. But when does art get too autobiographical?

As I talked about in my previous post, I'm generally averted to serious art because it seems too linked to me emotionally. This causes some issues.

1. People may not care about my emotions very much, and thus it might be more of a self-satisfying rant than anything else
2. People might start questioning my personal motivations for each piece, thus trying to examine and analyze my psychological issues more than I am comfortable with
3. It's hard to emotionally detach from the work, making it more difficult to digest criticism
4. Most of the time, I am not a very serious person, and writing serious pieces can put me in a mood that I don't like, or that I do not see as a predominant mood

Let me address each of these one by one

Who Cares?

There are two answers for this.

(1) I care about my work, even if no one else does. I can write work without the intention of sharing it with anyone, and that's okay.

(2) If other people care about my work, that gives it public value. What determines if they care? I don't know, but if they care, then it's important. Nirvana was the music of one incredibly angsty man, but a lot of people care to hear it. Allie Brosh only writes stories about herself, and people care about that.

Close friends and family generally care about my work, mostly because they are obligated to. How can I tell if other people care? I suppose I simply need to put myself out there more. If I don't get positive responses, clearly I will have to change something.

Psychoanalysis

I don't want my art to turn into Read It and Weep. For those who don't know, it's a Disney channel film about a girl whose diary becomes a best seller, and all the people in her life realize the characters are based on them, which causes them all to hate her. That's scary! I don't want to do that. I love my friends. Though I get upset with them sometimes (as everyone does with their own friends), overall they are incredibly wonderful people. 

Of course, it's usually negative emotions that drive you to make art. You don't make a story about "the day that was wonderful where nothing went wrong." So if art tends to be autobiographical, and art is also inspired by negative experiences, that could make a dangerous combination if one is not careful.

Still, you have people like Taylor Swift who write about all of their ex-boyfriends, and people eat up that crap like desert.

I think the best way to deal with this is to listen to my gut. If I think, "This could cause problems," then there's a really good chance I'm right. If you've seen some of the stuff I've written on this blog, or the crap that's come out of my mouth, you can see that I am a person with few boundaries. So if my gut is trying to tell me something, I'm probably doing something very risky, and I should re-evaluate.

Emotional Detachment

I think the simple solution to this issue is time. Right when I write something I care about it. Next week I care a little less. A month later and it's sitting at the bottom of my dusty mental shelf, beneath the new load of things I have written to supplant it.

Mood

I think the way to deal with mood is to simply make a choice on the mood that you want. Of course, you don't want to make a choice that suppresses your creativity. On the other hand, you need to be careful of engaging too heavily in certain moods, or else you will go insane. 

For example, I realized listening to Nirvana would worsen my already negative mood and lead me to make poor decisions. It would perpetuate bad feelings and bad habits. So, I forbade myself from listening to Nirvana nearly two years ago. That's also about the same time my enduring depression ended. There is probably more of a correlation between the two than I would like to admit.

Nirvana is an excellent band, no doubt. But I can't make art like Nirvana because Nirvana has caused harm to my life, and I would never want to do that to other people. Yes, it was also good for me to listen to Nirvana when I was depressed because I felt like Kurt Cobain sympathized with me, but the relationship between me and the ghost of Cobain was horribly toxic.

Some artists thrive in negativity. Negativity is addictive, both to the artist themselves and the consumer of art. Must we sacrifice sympathy for emotional stability?

Let me give you a notorious example. In Goethe's book The Sorrows of Young Werther, the protagonists commits suicide in a glorified manner. This resulted in a phenomenon called copycat suicide, where men were inspired by Young Werther to take their own lives.

Should Goethe be at least partially responsible for these deaths?

Of course that's pretty extreme, but I think it gets my point across.

I think the decision of mood has been at least partially made for me. I do not want to make art that drives people to be depressive or suicidal. At the same time, I do not want to be a comedic fluff, or else I wouldn't be having this conflict in the first place.

Where is the balance? Perhaps I will not understand my general mood (and general style) until I make more work. I will have to swing between two sides of the pendulum before I fall into balance.

Although after bringing up this idea, I'm actually very interested in discussing the question of art and mood, and art's obligation to society as a mood setter.