The internet is full of shit contributions to the arts. I need to say, before I go on, that I celebrate all of them and I'm in awe of everyone that puts themselves out there to face judgment. This seems an apt place to applaud these heroics as this community is literally designed for people to bare all and open themselves up to be admired and appreciated (or otherwise.)
Even amongst those that signed up to gawp at beauty, there are some hugely soulful and exposing bloggers, amateur photographers, singers, artists, poets, musicians and more. Many have wonderful things to say and show and many don't but they don't really care.
I've always been a member of one social network or another that revolves around the arts. Elfwood, DeviantArt, et all and I've produced endless pages of prose to contribute and actually posted so little. What starts as an impulse to share has always descended in to my own literary cock blocking, my inner quality control officer winning out.
I don't really know where it came from, somewhere in my early teens I stopped drawing and not long after the flow of writing ceased too. It had become all too damaging to my self esteem, not because I feared the judgement of my peers (although I suppose that was implied) but because my own criticism was so damaging, so scathing and so hurtful that I was always knocked back. The final product was never completed.
It's stopped me practicing instruments (I've owned shit loads), it's stopped me singing sober (I put on silly voices to pretend I can't sing, I was a child soloist) and it was this overwhelming self criticism that eventually dropped me out of university in the deepest depression of my life (fuck you, flimsy curtain pole.)
Yet the internet is full of crudely drawn anime, corny, emo poems, YouTube singer song writers that can't sing in key and terrible fan fiction that nobody will ever read. Yet the minds behind them are happy, they're having a wail of a time and why shouldn't they? There's nothing wrong with not being Monet, Dylan Thomas or Tolkien just so long as you're enjoying yourself, right? There's no "bad" art, it all has worth and merit.
Have these people learned to turn off the filter? Did they really just never develop one? I wish I knew and I wish they'd teach me how.
