Sometimes I miss making bad art.

Doodles in the margins of homework; angsty teenage poetry; amateur sketches and cartoons. I spent a lot of my teenage years making that (and more!) and, every now and then, I really miss it. I miss just making stuff, showing it to friends in the real world and friends online, and then doing something else. Sharing what you’d made was so important, it felt like you were making stuff for people to see, stuff that would be appreciated. With it I miss the space for some of it — a lot of it — to be bad. 

Something’s changed over the years. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the internet. But I feel like the bar for what you see online is better these days. Maybe part of it is that I’ve gotten older and so the part of the internet I find myself in is aimed for an older, less amateur audience; maybe part of it is the internet consolidating around a handful of websites and so those small community corners have disappeared. If you share something online and want it to be noticed, it’s gotta be really good to be noticed on one of those few websites.

The thing is, making bad art is how you got better at it. I know for a fact that my various hard drives are littered with pieces of lackluster writing and movies of all sorts that are much worse than what I make now, along with attempts at programming games and rudimentary CGI work. I tried making stuff.

I wonder how much of it is a part of growing older and it being harder to unabashedly try something new (and of course the fear that I might be and at it). I wonder how much of it is the contemporary ethos focusing so much on the art you make and share online having to be good and professional and marketable that I recoil at the idea of making something bad. But you have to make bad art to make good art. Bad photography eventually becomes good photography, so on and so forth. And bad art, as terrible as it is, is your art. My bad doodle probably isn’t gonna win any awards or end up on the front page of reddit, but it’s me trying to capture something I see.

So really, there’s nothing stopping me from making bad art except my own hubris. And then maybe that and art will be good art — or at least less bad art. But at least it’d still be mine.