Art as War

Art as War

by | Jul 15, 2025 | Blog

Somewhere in the strange land of four a.m. I realized I had not looked at a clock for eight hours. Nor had I eaten, or even stood up from my desk. All night, I had been writing manically across various projects, jumping from one idea to the next like someone possessed. I was not so much fighting as simply weathering an assault, ducking and dodging thoughts as they jumped out of the darkness around me.

My opponent was the detritus of a couple of short stories, the guts of an already failing novel (which would remain unfinished, as usual), and more scraps of poetry than I could count.

At that moment, I felt buried in creative wreckage, like something inside me had exploded, propelling fragments of consciousness in every possible direction. To this, I had added a generous helping of my own squalor. An unmade bed, items of clothing strewn across the floor, at least a dozen dirty cups or mugs on various surfaces.

I had not been drinking then, although I felt a familiar fuzz around the edges of my vision, the sensation of having had the shit kicked out of me by nothing more substantial than a dream. For a long time, I just sat, trying to steady myself.

No good. Too much caffeine. Not enough of it. No booze.

The whole place was ransacked. Every corner resembled a battle site. I went to the bathroom for a drink of water and glimpsed bare bones in the mirror, the angular hostility of an unshaven jaw; eyes sunken and dark from no sleep, like two bruised moons.

No, I had not been drinking that night. I hadn’t been sick or fighting with anyone. Nothing had happened to me, nothing at all. I had been writing.

Just trying to make art.

Self Against Self

Art is beauty — I have no doubt. But there are times when I feel that it is also war; that a major aspect of any creative effort involves pitting one part of the self against the other.

On one hand, I experience a constant compulsion to make and engage with art, to live creatively no matter the cost. On the other, I find something within me fiercely resisting the same impulse, at times fighting doggedly against it.

I sit at my desk, ostensibly calm and unmoving. But something isn’t working. The words aren’t coming. Ideas hover around me, but won’t fall into place. Finally, I think of a good sentence and move my fingers to strike the keys; but half of them hit the wrong letter, or hit no letter at all, so that all that emerges is a garbled non-sentence and the fading laughter of fleeing inspiration.

My art — all the art I’ve ever made appears before me as a single substance, a sea of thin, yellowing fiber spreading across my desk like mold.

Still sitting calmly, but now incensed, I feel my muscles tighten and my skin begin to sweat. I want to jump up and tackle myself; I want to bash in my own head.

Why isn’t this working for me!

And yet to an outsider looking in, I’m just sitting there quietly with my head in my hands.

The process is not always this intense, of course. Sometimes, I take my notebook to a quiet coffee shop where I can sit and watch people come and go. I often wander with my camera, raising the lens now and then to probe some salient detail in the otherwise familiar surroundings. Maybe I’ll find an important truth there, maybe just something that makes me smile.

As always, the city is at war around me, but for a moment, I am immune to it, shielded from the ceaseless conflagration of modern life by the same thing that not a few nights ago was grinding me into the ground.

This too is the creative process — another form of it.

A Fraught Dichotomy

Is this dichotomy really necessary? Shouldn’t making art always feel like that coffee shop and casual stroll? Something gentle, fortifying. After all, this is something I choose to do, something I make great effort to find space for in my life. I sure as hell don’t get paid for it — not frequently, at least. Nor does society at large find it particularly worthy of their attention.

And yet I do it. I want to do it. I love it.

Ah yes, the L-word. There’s your answer right there.

You think love is always olive branches and doves?

Your Heart is a Battlefield

This makes me think of something William Faulkner said when receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1943. Giving a speech at the celebratory banquet he described good writing as concerned with “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

In context, he was addressing future generations of writers, fearing that in the anxiety-inducing shadow of the Nuclear Age, they would turn their attention from inner to outer, weakening their work as a consequence.

For Faulkner and other practitioners of literary modernism, the inner life of the individual assumes absolute primacy in the grand drama of the species as a whole. They do not dismiss external aspects such as the wars that defined their time, but seek root causes in human consciousness.

From this perspective, when humans fight each other it is really because they are fighting themselves, are struggling to contain an unending inner rebellion.

Where the Nineteenth Century was preoccupied with external socio-political ills imposed on the individual by agents of power, the modernists considered the most significant enemy to lurk within. To catch a glimpse of it, you have only had to look in the nearest mirror.

Following this logic, you come to a clear conclusion: Without resolving inner conflict, all other conflicts remain inevitable.

Is this what the creative act is — a heart at war with itself? Not just within the content of an artwork, but through the process itself. Is the impulse to create a form of self-struggle through which we play out our own existential uncertainties? When we make art, we are simultaneously trying to make our selves, to craft our own being according to principles inexpressible as mere logic?

If so, what does it mean to have some part of our personality actively oppose this?

Where does this villain come from? What is it, even?

Abstract black and white photography of a child writing.
Image by the author.

Being Against Non-Being

There is more happening here than can be explained by common psychological pathologies and the stresses of the modern world. Yes we may turn away from art for any number of mundane reasons, many of them plausible — a lack of money and time; the need to earn a living and focus on our loved ones; common human neuroses like self-doubt, fear and poor self-worth.

But in the struggle to create, a deeper existential resistance comes into play, something almost spiritual in the way that it pits fundamental principles against each other.

Why something instead of nothing? Why be when it would be easier not to be? Why endure the struggle of making something, when you could sit on the couch and drink beer instead?

As animals equipped with fierce survival instincts, we take this desire to exist as a given, as a quality shared across the length and breadth of human experience. We want to live. To live is good, a gift — how could we choose anything other than life? This is why suicide is so abhorrent to us — the ultimate refutation of species and civilization.

At the same time, we acknowledge that to be is difficult, that existence is fraught with inevitable suffering, whether through big, flashing catastrophes such as war and poverty, or just the unremarkable fact of our mortality and impermanence.

Why are we so certain that existence is favorable to non-existence; or that the creative act is a worthwhile expenditure of time and effort?

Maybe that inner force trying to prevent us from creating anything new, actually has our best interests at heart. Maybe it’s trying to save the universe the pain of yet more existence, yet more complexity, confusion, suffering and loss.

Because you can’t suffer if you don’t exist…

You can’t be a failed artist if you don’t try to make art in the first place…

Following this problem, Christian theologian Paul Tillich acknowledges that simply existing takes a certain amount of bravery and resolve; that to live is a choice we make daily, an inverted version of Camus’ view of life as a daily rejection of suicide.

For Tillich, “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.” That is to say, God’s role in a believer’s life is not so much as an arbiter of their existence, but as the source of strength they draw upon to live fully despite the suffering endemic to day-to-day consciousness. In Tillich’s opinion, the external, deistic god — God The Father — has disappeared, replaced by the god of personal existence, of our inner life.

Maybe art plays the same role in the lives of those of us who do not believe, the artist creating as a statement of their own courage to be, their work a personal answer to the silence of the gods.

In this case, creative resistance might be thought of as a personal devil, an eternal adversary pitted against the goodness of life. To make art is to refute non-being and any piece of created work is a record of its defeat.

That’s why art is difficult sometimes, sometimes such a struggle — not only because these qualities imbue it with significance and meaning, but because any created thing is a microcosm of life as a whole, of all of creation.

Art as war. Art as love and beauty. All these qualities impossibly entwined.

Abstract black and white child writing. Only hand and pencil are visible.
Writing in the dark. Image by author.

Sunday. Three-thirty. Soft gray light through the slats of the shade across my desk. The apartment is quiet, the streets outside strangely subdued. There is nowhere to be, nothing that needs done as a matter of urgency. Books and notebooks fan out around me. Otherwise, my room is clean and tidy, my face neatly shaven and well-slept. No pits for eyes today.

Yet, I’m still not completely at ease.

The article you’re reading was a difficult piece, for sure. It started as something entirely different and then split and spread out in several directions at once, winnowing wildly between contrasting themes and perspectives.

In other words, it was a mess.

I’ll confess, I despair a little at times like these. With so much of my self-worth contingent on my creative output, my well-being is often dangerously tethered to how well a given project is going, how often I’m publishing and the kind of reactions I get when I do.

I have to get something out of every session. I have to be consistent with my posting, produce new work as often as possible. If just this one measly article takes so long and requires so much effort, how can I ever hope to post weekly, let alone daily, the way some people do?

And even after all that work, it’s still a mess anyway — garbled, incoherent, mercilessly ambling…

Maybe. Maybe not.

But it’s made, at least— a new creation, something that once wasn’t and now is. Between something and nothing, I chose something, and I saw it through and gave it form, no matter how imperfect.

I think that alone is worth a deep breath and maybe another cup of coffee before I stretch and sigh and brace once again for the next battle.

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An Open Letter to Creatives: Maintaining Artistic Integrity

An Open Letter to Creatives: Maintaining Artistic Integrity

by | Jul 2, 2025 | Blog

It is difficult to achieve an authentic, creative life in a world that overwhelmingly privileges commercial gain, measurable success and indiscriminate attention of any kind; a world in which the value of a creative work is defined more by the capital it produces than by the authenticity of its message.

By capital I mean both hard currency and cultural reach — an insatiable need for attention of any kind, often called relevance, and most commonly manifest as likes, views and subscribers. Not only can these be leveraged for financial gain, but they create an intoxicating amount of psychological satisfaction, at least in the short term. The value of being seen, even unfavorably, has usurped the value of adding something of substance into the stream of the collective consciousness.

Algorithmic dynamics exacerbate this trend, encouraging creators to post broadly-targeted (dumbed down) work as often as humanly possible and with a cynical eye for market trends. Hence the current deluge of poor to mediocre content flooding every field, genre and platform.

Such work is generally characterized by an across-the-board lack of complexity. Eager to avoid challenging the reader in any way, it tends to be stylistically bland and philosophically rudimentary. Occasionally, a creator will harness inflammatory, controversial content to generate attention, but the end result is always the same: Relevance leveraged for material gain.

In our current landscape, quality work is still available, but has become subsumed by quantity as even a cursory glance at any social media platform (including Medium) will affirm.

To navigate this world without compromising one’s creative integrity is a difficult task. Some argue that it is impossible.

 

Creative Integrity is Personal Authenticity

 

What does it mean to insist on creative authenticity, both in the work produced and the process used to produce it?

Ultimately, only the individual artist can answer this question through the prism of their own goals and sensibilities. My personal concept of creative integrity is based on the assumption that all humans have a base essence (often referred to as their authentic self), which becomes easily muddied by social pressures and norms. A large part of our existential struggle blooms from our attempts to resist these pressures and return to the purity of childhood. The more faithfully you honor your essence with your art, the more integrity your work will have.

Note that honoring your essence does not mean explicitly expressing it or working solely within its thematic boundaries. One’s best work need not specifically reference their own life. Rather, one’s essence manifests when the artist expresses what they must express (vision subject and theme) without calculating potential rewards. Such work is typically unaffected by popular trends and market forces, although it may inadvertently align with them, if the artist is lucky.

In this way, the artist divorces their basic methods of development, revision and delivery from the fluctuating laws of the commercial sphere, which invests in authenticity only to the extent that it produces reward.

This is the kind of artist who has something inside them that refuses to rest, that compulsively demands to be channeled into creative effort. This artist creates for the sheer joy of creation, valuing process over product. Their standards are their own, their subjects sacred.

Maybe you have tried at times to suppress this kind of creative impulse, to pursue a more practical way of life, a career or business venture, attempting to treat your art as a hobby or something you do when time allows.

And maybe you’ve discovered that this is impossible, that the creative act demands a place at the center of your existence, asserting itself as your primary vocation, around which all other work becomes secondary. This is a matter of focus rather than time as the reality of late stage capitalism requires that we spend the majority of our hours working for pay. Even so, creative effort must remain the factor that most justifies our existence.

I personally do not consider myself to have a career. I certainly don’t identify with my job title. I am grateful for my nine-to-five job, which keeps me engaged with the world and affords me food, shelter and other necessities while I pursue creative projects. But on some level, it remains a necessary evil, certainly inasmuch as it demands so much of my time.

Maybe you have not experienced things at such extremes, yet remain compelled to take your artistic projects more seriously than the world is willing to reward you for.

To various extent, most artists face the same tension between the need to create and the need to function in material society. Our trouble is that dedication, craft and authenticity do not equal financial viability and at times may even jeopardize it. If we’re lucky, the work we do will have some kind of market value. By all means celebrate this as good fortune. But when it does not, we are often faced with the temptation to give up, or make compromises that dilute the essence of our work so that it better meets the demands of the market.

The voice of our true self demands that create this, and the voice of the market demands that we create that. Unless these two overlap, we are unlikely to find fulfilment.

In such cases, we are left with a bruising sense of self-betrayal, the lingering knowledge that we have lied to ourselves, that we are profaning something sacred for profit or esteem.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that commercial success automatically constitutes inauthenticity or inferior artistry. Many superlative works have successfully generated both financial profit and cultural cache and represent particular value as they nudge mass culture and consumption towards a more advanced states of consciousness. But these works remain the exception rather than the rule.

Of course, life rarely unfolds in such neatly delineated extremes and not every compromise we make will constitute an absolute betrayal of our creative essence. Nor will we necessarily recognize our compromises as we make them, understanding only later the ways in which we fell short of realizing our vision. Falling short is an inevitable aspect of the human experience and becomes instructive when recognized and harnessed as a catalyst for change.

Some will argue that consistent compromise is unavoidable and that to refuse the demands of a broader audience is a stubborn and insufferable form of entitlement. It is certainly presumptuous to expect your most essential truth to appeal to an audience, but it is not for other people alone that we make art.

Ultimately, creating art is a way of life, a deeply personal experience, which needs no external justification. It is both an audacious, self-serving claim to the value of our own experience, and an empathetic, profoundly human desire to enrich the lives of others through it.

The fact remains; if our authenticity is not immediately appealing to enough people at a given time, then there is little we can do but proceed without excessive reward or redefine what reward means.

To accomplish the latter, we must make the profit outcome less relevant than the creative experience itself, the act of making art, which becomes the hinge on which the other parts of our life swing. To be seen, read, listened to or acknowledged is surely a viable goal for most artists. But it should not be the defining factor in their decision to create.

This is the minefield we navigate as committed artists, and I would caution you to consider that many little compromises quickly add up to a bigger betrayal, often realized far too late and when we have become accustomed to the seductive comforts of a compromised integrity.

Sometimes it is late at night, when we cannot sleep, that the sheerest clarity comes to us and we see clearly for the first time what we were and what we have become. It is perfectly possible to shuffle inch by inch of the edge of a cliff.

Of course, I have only scratched the surface of this ongoing, ever-evolving issue. But one thing seems particularly clear; as the content landscape grows ever-larger and artificial intelligence develops at pace, the terms of success will become increasingly complicated, and the authenticity of individual experience increasingly important.

Artificial intelligence can already outperform humans in creating bland, easily-consumed content at scale. It can already generate competent written work and is rapidly improving in the fields of photography, art and design. Video will be next, followed by music.

To outmaneuver this, we will need to be more authentic, more human, less inclined to produce for the machine.

So create honestly. Make whatever you want, however you want. Revel in the experience without hope or expectation. Don’t wonder who is looking. Paradoxically, this might be the key to creating work that others cannot ignore.

Let’s talk again soon

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