Know your audience

Know your audience. The audience I write for is the art audience, those people with a terminal inclination toward all things art-full and creative. The trouble is no one really knows what terminally creative is or have mastered the supposed art of artfulness. Its just something to fill in the long winter evenings. A story to tell ourselves when we are having our cups of tea, having eaten all the biscuits. We label ourselves and we label ourselves well in ego-pleasing ways. We are creative, they are not. We are right and in correct relationship with the world, pity about the others who are not. Its almost like a bad episode of ‘LOST’, which is ironic since there never has been any good episodes of the said drama. There will always be ‘others’ and as a result there will always be ‘us’, the foil to the otherness of the others.

Know your audience. We appreciate the fine things in life, like chucking fast drying acrylics at slow tightly woven constructs known as canvases. We frame and photograph the completed pieces with aplomb, and said up road side stalls to charge extortionate amounts of money to people who never come. We then hoard the pieces and tell ourselves that if we leave them out they’ll be damaged in the light and reassure our kids that they will be able to retire on the proceeds of their eventual sale after we are dead and gone, while the eat their M&Ms for breakfast, dinner and sometimes tea. We are artists, and I write for artists. I know my audience just as much as I know myself and if that is not reassurance enough, I’ll begin yet another painting, signing it carefully first before I begin, just in case I die during the night.