💌 not all artists are your friends 💌
A writer with a “career" is not always a good writer.
I’ve always centered artistic spaces because they felt safe– safer than everywhere else. Childhood memories of rehearsal rooms and backstage antics. In western Pennsylvania, theater was a space where I, a queer Iranian girl, felt a degree of empowerment. We were free to express ourselves and dream together. We were free to work hard towards a show and celebrate our creative choices. I’m so grateful for these moments of freedom, in a time and place where I was so silenced otherwise.
I entered art school with bright eyes for the future ahead of me. A future where I could craft narratives and imagine worlds better than this one, repeating the glory and uninhibited joys from my early years with my classmates. This is not what happened. NYU mandated every art student attend a series of lectures. These lectures centered around the “why”-- why we should be living artists, why we should create work. The answer revolved around our work “meaning something greater than ourselves” and implied the inherent nobility of artmaking. That art is a transformative tool, and we, 18-year-olds in the socioeconomic positions to attend NYU, are therefore inherently transformative people in society for this pursuit. Preaching sermons upon sermons about art, theater, and literature’s nobility in history and human experience while we sat there, in a giant lecture hall, in a neighborhood once bustling with starving artists now gentrified to death, never exchanging a glance with our classmates.
Artists exhibit coping mechanisms to justify their mediocrity all the time, and these lectures were training us on how to do so. I was no longer in a collaborative artistic space, I was in a competitive institution. So, I encountered many bad writers at NYU. Roughly half of my classmates in the dramatic writing program DID NOT LIKE TO WRITE. $80,000 a year for, if anything, a hobby of mild interest. No creative risks or serious engagement with the craft. I think about the rich kids, the conservatives, or anyone upholding white supremacy in creative spaces I’ve been in…I will no longer coddle lazy, bad work. A writer with a “career" is not always a good writer. Rich painters make bad art. Rich playwrights write bad plays. Rich directors rely on others to make their movies watchable. I think we seriously need to reconsider our goals– what are we truly chasing? Transformative powers and methods to share our vulnerabilities and imaginations, or a paycheck from blood money?
I firmly believe, now more than ever, there is nothing inherently noble about entering the art industry. Nothing at all. I do not care about your “art” if you, the artist or institution, stand without morals. Who cares about art made by people who care about nothing? Celebrities and fame have rotted our creative sensibilities and our understanding of ourselves. We move without purpose. I do not have the choice to make my work political. My existence in America is political.
I knew something was off during my education, but I couldn’t figure out what it was at the time. I vaguely understood my values and principles, but never enough to fully embody them in meaningful, loving ways. My general senses of justice and liberation never confronted the violence enacted to silence and kill. I didn’t know how to face the fact that I attended a school where board members make weapons to erase people like me. I didn’t know how to face the fact that the Dean of my school collaborates with the NYPD against protests. I didn’t know how deep the trauma scars of being a SWANA person in America actually went, especially in liberal spaces. Now, thankfully, I don’t cowardly look away, and I move with purpose and intention. Complicity and naivete are luxuries I can not continue to pursue if I want to survive. I feel a sense of permanent fulfillment that no fancy opportunity will ever grant me. I’m so grateful I learned this lesson.
We can use art to document what we stand for and the world we want to inhabit. The industry has saturated the mainstream art/writing/theater product to strive so far from meaning or purpose. We might see a generalized (and often, fetished) version of a SWANA experience on Broadway, but we simply will never experience the psychological warfare of being SWANA in America through mainstream theater that actually creates any change to the material experience of the people this art is supposed to be representing. If you think representation will solve America's white supremacist problem, you are misinformed and naive about the real world we are living in.
My theater education was hyper-individualistic. Everything I’ve learned about meaningful artmaking I’ve learned outside of an NYU classroom. Not all artists are my friends, and there’s nothing transformative or subversive in looking away, crying innocence. I laugh in the face of artists who claim their work isn’t political. It is.
Renewing your relationship to what you believe in can happen everyday, everywhere. It’s never too late to understand who you are and create art that fully embodies purpose and meaning and center the joy of artistic freedom. Accolades will never soothe the neverending hunger we feel. We need to feed this beast with love for each other’s authentic prosperity.