Joe Bunting

Please Leave If [vol. 8]: Are You Engaged?

Music, and all Art, is a conversation. In the act of creation, an artist puts their time, energy, and experience into a medium. Creating Art is a process of externalizing something internal.

Art cannot exist in a vacuum, though, and without minds open to receiving it, Art will cease to be Art. That is because it’s purpose is to lead others to a new way of looking at the world, at reality, at Truth. And yes, it’s always a new way of looking. Even if the subject has been done a thousand times in the same style, true Art makes all things new.

This places a great responsibility on you, the audience. If an artist’s role is externalizing the internal, the audiences burden is to internalize the external. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes music is automatically transferred by some pagan magic from our ears to our feet and hands (and booties), and without forethought we are dancing.

Other times it takes much more work. A poem might have to be studied, the words translated into images in our heads, and all of a sudden we are there, witnessing the event, almost breathless. Sometimes it takes something else. A painting we pass every day but never really see, suddenly becomes vivid in our thoughts and we are constantly reminded of it.

But if Art is not internalized, if it doesn’t take shape in our souls, then it hasn’t acheived it’s purpose, and it no longer is Art. It has become art, possessing none of the divine power of it’s mystical cousin. It is dead.

Whose fault is this death? Whose hands are stained with blood? The answer is easy. It is yours. It is mine. The artist’s and the audience’s. Through our combined laziness–or hurry, which is the ultimate laziness–we, together, have killed Art.

If you, the audience, are not willing to get your hands dirty and engage with my Art, and if I, the artist, am not ready to put all of myself into it, then we should both leave. We have no business being here at all.

Related posts:

Please Leave if [vol. 9]: If I Were Giving A Graduation Speach




Please Leave If [vol. 10]: No Happy Endings




Please Leave if [vol. 15]: Talk About It




What is Art?




Please Leave If [vol. 11]: You Drive a Hummer?! Uh oh…