Make Bad Art
As time marches on, the world has seen an increased emphasis on efficiency and pushing product output to the max. Unfortunately, this means that artists, and the art that they create, have fallen victim to the mindset that their craft must always be perfectly produced at rapid speeds. However, the many professors and peers of artists offer this as advice— make bad art.
The many hungry artists of today are turning to social media to spread their name and share their work. However, social media has become less of a place for connection, and more of a place for fast-paced, easily digestible, information. Due to this, artists are facing an ongoing battle with algorithms and engagement that is taking away from their overall creative process. The effects of this, aside from the impression that artwork must be produced promptly and on a mass scale, is a loss of passion, which the artist, and their artwork, suffers from. The advice to “make bad art” stems from this, offering itself as the first step back into a creative world that feels fostering, rather than fettering.
It is up to the artist to decide to make “bad” art, to give themselves permission to make something underwhelming, or perhaps pointless. Doing this, releasing oneself of outsider opinion and the expectation that a piece must be posted on social media, allows the artist to have fun again, to create for the sake of creating, to let works be of poor composition, smudged, or merely incompleted nonsense. Creating in this way, from the point of view of fun, lets metrics and screen to screen interaction fade from the mind, it allows the artist to let up on the outcome of the piece, and get lost in the process.
What is typically referred to as flowstate, the state of mind where ideas appear and disappear with ease, can be reached with much more potency when one has the mindset to “make bad art”. Materials feel brand new, thoughts remain at bay, and the works pulse with passion. This state, when the mind shuts down and an artist’s genius is booted up, is often when the work most favored by the artist is produced, as it is created without the opinions of algorithms.
Creating with such a mindset also provides an immense amount of skill enhancement for the artist. Practicing or sketching without the shadow of perfection lets one focus on the general world they are creating, letting the carefully placed and planned details fall to the side.
For example, if an artist were to draw a dozen faces, leaving each one messy and unfinished, they are practicing the general layout of each face, finding common areas for shadows, as well as space for characterization in each one. The artist is thus utilizing multiple creative muscles, multiple times, as if it were a workout. If an artist were to spend their time on one portrait, only stopping when objective perfection is reached, they exercise a muscle, and never return to it. Progress is still made, but this method may lead one to bypass the foundation of their piece and overthink the details that are added on top of said foundation.
For painters, a trick to letting this perfectionism go may be to use a slightly larger brush than the size that the task requires. This forces the details to be cast aside and the artist to immerse themselves into the world of the piece.
Overall, the notion, or advice, to make bad art, is another way to remind artists to have fun, to engage in creating merely to create, to throw away the seriousness that the art world has gained a reputation for. Making bad art is to do away with the commercial and social media element of art, allowing the feeling that one “has to” make art go, and let it morph into the feeling that one “gets to” make art, excitedly so.
