This is what we – as artists – have always done. We take our pain and we transform it into some kind of narrative, some show or story, something … else. We frame our trauma as best we can, and we offer it up. At best, it’s a gift; at worst, it’s a product. And the amount of enduring respect we bestow on our artists seems to be directly proportionate to how well, how authentically, how selflessly, they can take and deliver an emotional selfie like this.
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Any pain of any size can be transmuted into a gift of art. We cannot “make sense” of anything, really, although we can plod forth with our stupid little notebooks and paints and guitars, with our pathetically small little mirror-shards of offered reflections to one another, showing the poetic debris we’ve managed to harvest from our suffering.
Extraordinary Guardian essay by Amanda Palmer about Nick Cave, grief, the disorienting line between private and public in a creative life, and the artist’s eternal task to transmute pain into meaning.
Complement with Marina Abramović on turning trauma into raw material for art and Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering.