Archive for June, 2010

People in first world cultures have a habit of making things. This can be discerned by looking around and observing all the stuff that has been made. This method, unfortunately, does not allow us to gauge the incidence of people not making things. They don’t leave evidence laying around proving they didn’t make things. However, I’m going to make an unfounded assumption and say that a very high percentage of people are in the habit of making things.

Why?

Several reasons come to mind: Initially that making things is rewarded. If you make something that people like that earns you attention and potentially money. That alone would be sufficient to explain the vast majority of observed things, but I’m going to continue making unfounded assumptions and assert that there are more reasons. The next reason that comes to mind is the desire to prove one’s worth. This overlaps somewhat with the previous reason but does not necessarily require an audience or the intent to an audience other than one’s self. There are also evolutionary biology reasons: it is well documented that animals of all types tend to engage in play that provides practice for their life skills. A naive mechanism that encourages such play could also encourage more intellectual creation in a civilized context.

I ask these questions because I myself have a rather powerful urge to create. It is why this post exists. I do not, however, have terribly much to say. I am a rather financially and socially well off nihilist. I have few desires or concerns other than maintaining the status quo, and even were the status quo to change I wouldn’t be too upset. This, ironically, is a system that at least points in the direction of establishing its own equilibrium. The desire to create coupled with a lack of message brings about a concern and a point of focus that I am quite comfortable rambling about. That is, ostensibly, the catalyst of art. Or it is, at least, a nucleus around which art is liable to condense.