There’s a tendency in the writing community to be suspicious of the word “art.” For a lot of people, the word is pretentious, a grandiose attempt to elevate our writing to something it’s not. Instead, we’re often encouraged to see what we produce as “work”—not anything as fancy as “art” but instead just the result of our diligent labor, ultimately no different from what we might produce at any job. As I’ve written about before, even the language of contemporary writing points to this modest view: we study “craft,” we “workshop,” we try to make our stories “work.” Work, work work—that’s how we’re taught to think about writing. It’s not art. It’s work.
As you might have guessed, I find this framing a little bit depressing. I don’t like to think of my writing as a job. “Job” suggests a drudgery that I try and use writing to escape from. After all, like a lot of writers, I already have a job (or a “day job,” as they call it), one which already involves plenty of “work.” Also, I don’t actually make a sustainable living from writing—and as that recent and widely discussed Medium post made clear, very few contemporary writers actually can, which is why the standard career path for a successful writer today usually involves teaching at an MFA program. And so, if writing really were a job, it would be an incredibly exploitative one (and one that would probably violate even the United States’s lax labor standards).
More broadly, in our neoliberal world, we’re already encouraged to think of everything through the lens of economics—everything is a marketplace and everyone is a product. Writers, of course, are not immune from this thinking: as I wrote before in a piece on productivity, the twenty-first-century image of the writer is no longer the whiskey-swilling cigarette-smoking bohemian of yore but instead the entrepreneur, who’s always selling their products and promoting their brand via social media. I don’t, of course, fault individual writers for doing this (if you follow me on Twitter, you know I do it too)—we’re just doing what we need to get people to read what we write. But it does show just how much the idea of “work” has permeated so many aspects of a writer’s life.
And that, ultimately, I think, is why it’s more important than ever not to give up the word “art”—in a world where everything is work, it’s important to have something outside of that framework, something that can exist for us on a higher plane. Over time, the word “art” has come to signify something elevated, rarefied, exalted, ultimately special, something spiritually significant that conveys a meaning deeper than the ordinary—what Shelley believed “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world” and what Walter Pater argued gives “the highest quality to your moments as they pass.”
In an essay in n+1 back in 2006, Elif Batuman made fun of the way contemporary writers think about writing, how they see “art” as “aristocratic, decadent, egotistical, self-indulgent” whereas “craft” is “useful, humble, ascetic, anorexic.” Batuman was ultimately critiquing a contemporary trend, but let’s accept her half-satirical descriptors. So what if art is aristocratic and decadent? Most writers I know don’t live aristocratic lives—they work their day jobs, take care of their children, and often have only rare, captured moments in which to write. Why should they not let themselves feel a little egotistical and self-indulgent in those brief moments? Too much of contemporary life already values what is “useful,” and I think writing is too special to corrupt with such neoliberal values. Writing even a five thousand word short story takes an incredible amount of time, weeks if you’re lucky, more realistically months or even years. Writing a novel takes even longer: my own took me close to a decade. Why would I have put all that effort into something if I didn’t believe it had the kind of importance Shelley and Pater describe, that in its own small way it could lift a veil from the world, if not from a hidden beauty, then at least from a hidden something, and that it could help people experience their moments at a higher quality? If I didn’t think of it as art, I would never have been able to write it.