Another coating of paint to cover up the blot. Another strike with pristine blue ink. Another restringing of the chords. Another mistake that we’re afraid of.
Why are we so afraid? As far as I know, perfectionism is not a virtue. It is an affliction. An affliction that is constantly being drilled into our minds every day, with the endless din of the modern world. This din is a but a steady chant: “You’re not worthy. Not yet, atleast. Follow the rules, my love. And don’t toe the line, no! That is for the exiles and the deviants. And no one likes those.” And so we begin to listen to the din. We start defining everything, including something as organic as art itself.
We start colouring between the black borders, and we start singing in the same tune that our teacher instructs us to. We don’t dare to look the world in the eye and say: “Well, screw you. I will make my own art.” Our dreams are killed, our sandcastles trampled, our pillow forts taken away.
And to hammer the final nail in the coffin: the concept of “good art” and “bad art”. How ridiculous! How can you look me in the eye and tell me that my painting wasn’t “good enough” to “meet your criteria”? Are you even true to your art, going about judging and grading something someone put their blood, sweat and tears into? Do you ever try to find the rhythm in their words, the plea in their songs? How is something that I bleed my heart into “second” to someone else’s work?
Tell a bird that it cannot fly, and it will never soar its wings to the sky. Tell a child that their poem is “not so good”, and they shall never open that journal again. That is how they shove us aside. Us, the ones whose art they do not “like”. That is how they choke our art to death.
If you think long enough, would you still believe the boy who would sit at the last bench of your class when he told you that he hates drawing? What if I told you that his parentstook one look at the fire truck he drew with plastic crayons at his kindergarten school and laughed till tears streamed down their eyes? What if I dared to add that his own teacher frowned when he showed her a depiction of a dinosaur sitting in a UFO, with its purple eyes and yellow skin?
It’s not just school that kills art, it is systematic perfectionism. It is the incessant streamlining of expectations. The art that we see is not enough. There is art in the buried aspirations of many artists around the world who threw away their dreams, who were too afraid.
