No gallery showings, no awards, no sales, no contests or acclaim. No paintings are even being made.
Forget all hypotheticals about trees and forests and sounds the real inquiry is this: if you’re an artist that doesn’t make art, are you still an artist? Or is the pure ambition enough? Because if you do it and fail, you’re a hack or a sell out or the bullshit dreamer everyone hates. Get a real fucking job, amiright? If you stop painting, you can’t fail, and you might just save your pure artistic soul from unoriginal damnation.
He asks about the painting, after the lattes are brought, the biscotto is split. Of course he asks, because ‘art’ in its hallowed glory was your shared religion, once upon a time in the beginning, although you were in the denomination of the visual and he a worshiper of the sound.
You deflect, take a sip of that over-sweat coffee-like drink, say, “Oh, it’s… coming along.”
“I know how that feels,” he says, but you deny him this common ground. No, no. He was on stage last night (two nights ago? Just a few hours back?). He was hashtag making it.
“Well, it’s… it’s…” He is embarrassed, but he’s glowing from the inside. “It’s not exactly what I’d do with all the creative freedom in the world, but it’s getting paid to do what I love. It’s an audience caring… I can never hate the frets under my fingertips.”
You close your eyes and instead of darkness you see goldenrod yellow.
#
The girl in the hot pink tube top is back. She weaves through the crowd like that is its own sort of dance. You watch her. She never goes to the bar, never lingers long with any one partner, and doesn’t seem interested in finding someone to leave with.
She’s just here to dance.
Not for fame. Not to seduce. Just for the existence of the dance itself.
“When was the last time we danced?” you ask Chip when he comes over to deliver your drink. Did your mind skim over and forget him asking you what you wanted, or was he the one that skipped his part?
“Did you want to?”
You shake your head in a tiny shimmer of ‘no.’ Dancing feels young, and you feel too old. And tired. And weary. Like it’s perpetually winter.