 |
 |
 |
There is a pervasive notion in our society that artists are supposed to specialize in one form of art, and if they compose music and write novels and draw pictures they must be spreading themselves too thin and their creations must be inferior to the work of artists who only do one thing.
Poppycock. I recently read an anthology of contemporary poems, most of which I found dreadful. However, the work of three of these poets struck me as brilliant and masterful. In reading the biographies of the contributors at the end of the anthology, I learned that one of the three poets I admired was an accomplished musician, another was an avid visual artist, and the third was a renowned software designer. The awful poets were all revealed to be academics specializing in, you guessed it, poetry.
The wonderful fact is that everything we do informs everything else we do, and to limit ourselves and each other by insisting we specialize in only one thing is the death of intuition and spontaneity which are progenitors of originality, without which art is useless.