When I was younger my parents friends and family would ask me, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And I always had different answers for them. Sometimes I was quite sure that I was gonna be an actress. By now I would have already been in Hollywood making it in the film business. Then again I was sure I'd become a writer, an author and that writing stories and plays was gonna be my life. Eventually I dreamt about actually living from my poetry as well. And then I started dancing and singing and all of a sudden I was sure to tell people that I was gonna study to become a Musical performer.
All of the above might not be the same but I always got the same reactions from most people: "Well dream on." The human that I am, I obviously compared those reactions to what my friends would get for their ideas. And it doesn't matter what they were wanting to become, a teacher, a lawyer, a construction worker, a painter, a doctor, a business owner, people just nodded and smiled. Why? Why was the idea of becoming an artist of any form so crazy and why did no one simply smile, nod and say: "That's great Anna. I believe in you." Don't get me wrong, I obviously had my parents and certain friends that really did believe in me, but most strangers I met were all almost ridiculed and just sarcastically wished me "Good Luck with that then." Quite sad to think that almost every human being consumes art almost every day but most people don't take the young becoming artists with the wish to actually produce it, seriously.
When I started my first year at Uni in London, where I was studying Creative and Professional Writing, we had a student meeting in the Welcome week and I got to meet many people studying many different things. I was feeling quite confident and nervous at the same time and I actually was pretty proud to be doing writing. So when someone asked me what I was studying, I thought, well now it's my time to shine, I'm becoming a writer. The guy looked at me, laughed and said: "aha okay so you sit in your campus room, look out the window and write? That's it?" There it was again... So how to answer that? I simply asked him if he knew Harry Potter, which he did and he started talking about how much he liked it. So then I asked him what he thinks J. K. Rowling was doing while writing the story that he is so obsessed with. What were the writers of all the Netflix series doing while writing the script for all those seasons that he binge watched in the past years. Probably looking out their window. He didn't know what to say after that and someone else standing next to me, a performing arts student, was thankfully smiling at me. Then we started a different topic and that conversation was over.
So yeah why is there so much prejudice when it comes to artists? My professor once showed us two pictures, one of a Starbucks cup and one of a book. He made the idea of the hardship of art so simple with those two pictures, pointing out that one of these two we need, and the other one we might want.
Photo by jojordan-art
The thing that frustrates me is that what we do as artists has so much value in this world. A world without art would be quiet, grey, simply empty and boring. I mean I can't go a week without listening to music, probably not even a day. Well I probably could if I had to but I don't, do I? Because music, movies, writing is always available for us and these days we mostly don't even have to pay for it anymore, because we can find it online, stream it pay a monthly sum for access to thousands of songs, audio books and more. Or we just go on YouTube and Voila! To be honest, I think that the consumption of art is probably one of the biggest parts in a teenagers life. I used to be on YouTube and Netflix all the time until I forced myself to limit my use of those apps a bit. Fairly that is also why the theatre is dying out. Because the world is becoming a digital one.
What I am trying to say in this Post is that I wished there wasn't as much mistrust in the idea of an artist as a serious profession as well as I wished the government would start funding arts more and that it started counting as a regular degree in all countries, especially my own country Germany, where for example creative writing is a private study and not to be found at any state universities.
I do see what my professor was pointing out by the question of what do people need and what do they want, but don't we all need Art to be? Isn't Art as essential as a Starbucks coffee? I believe it simply is.
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