I can only show you the door...

Some artists view the world as if looking through a window at things happening ‘out there,’ while others view the world inside themselves. Either way, the autobiographical vantage point is implicit.

If art is about the self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression. And it is -– but that is not necessarily all it is. It may be only a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something that you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are the custodian of issues larger than self.

Some people who make art are driven by inspiration, others by provocation, still other by desperation. Art-making grants access to worlds that may be dangerous, sacred, forbidden, seductive, or all of the above. It grants access to worlds you may otherwise never fully engage. It may in fact be the engagement –- not the art–that you seek. The difference is that making art allows, indeed guarantees, that you declare yourself. Art is contact, and your work necessarily reveals the nature of that contact. In making art, you are declaring what is important.

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Geography

A Guide to the Seven Continents of my Digital World:

How I Became a Madman Kahlil Gibran

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, -- I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the curséd thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house- top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

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