In Support of Terrible Art

This month is National Novel Writing Month. Artsy types everywhere are cramming at night to assemble a 50,000-word novel by midnight on the 30^th, hoping for a prize from the NaNoWriMo committee. Skeptics, many of them friends with these nouveau novelists, are not happy about the festival, however. (I don’t know any situation in which I’d say skeptics are happy about something, but there we have it.)  Columnists have complained on the internet about NaNoWriMo, calling it an ego project that only serves to contribute to the abundance of awful art on the internet.

Participants in NaNoWriMo have retorted that several published novels, most notably Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, started at projects in the competition. But those who make this defense, as well as the project’s critics, are missing the real point of the competition.

We in the United States and other western nations live in a thoroughly industrialized world. (Point two for obvious statements.) Part of living so enmeshed in an economy is that we must, for perhaps eight hours a day, participate in mounds of work which we may or may not enjoy doing. We subvert our creativity and play into someone else’s economic fantasy. We can look for a job we enjoy, but at the end of the day, we can’t all do whatever we want.

But we want. We want to create. We want to bring something into this world that no one else did or will make. Jean-Paul Sartre understood this when he formulated his philosophy of authenticity. Art lets us feel meaningful, individual, and powerful, all vital human impulses.

It was this economic conundrum that many anti-societal writers have discussed. Another great was environmentalist and “rogue economist” E. F. Schumacher, who wrote in his classic work Small is Beautiful about the tragedy of modern creativity. Because of mass production, one who wishes to work with their own hands must be wealthy enough to create a studio to do so. It cannot be a person’s livelihood to create handmade versions of common objects; it’s simply not economical.

The beauty of the internet is how it has flipped that paradigm entirely on its head. Using the mass-produced and increasingly mass-available computer, anyone can create anything and share it with anyone. Everyone, especially those working drone jobs, needs a creative outlet. It’s why, everyday, the internet fills more with stunning Flickr photography, artsy YouTube videos, strange SoundCloud songs, hilarious Tumblr satires, and, of course, opinionated blog posts. And the platforms are all free.

It doesn’t matter if everyone who reads a NaNoWriMo novel judges it utter shit. It doesn’t matter if nobody reads it at all. It doesn’t matter if piles and piles of disgustingly awful novels sit on the website and never get seen once. What matters is that someone created them. Art isn’t about the best and the brightest anymore, the vision of divinely-inspired creators rising to the top of the art world. Art is about each person as an individual.

To readers participating in NaNoWriMo: Stay sane and keep at it. To my friends who create everything else that makes the internet a better place: keep doing what you do. To anyone who wants to create terrible, terrible art: go for it. No matter how badly you do, you’ll be happier with yourself. If you need me, I’ll be over here blogging.