What The Room Allows

Suffering, we are told, is what makes art real. The artist who has known poverty, grief or exile is the one most experienced in feeding us truths about the world. Their pain becomes proof of sincerity, a credential the comfortable cannot forge. This is a complicated idea that turns artistic endeavour into martyrdom, and it is also largely wrong. Most of us, reading this article, are fortunate enough to live lives that are colourful and vibrantly tumultuous. We exist in societies and reside in countries that do not explicitly restrict us daily, punish us for the simple mistakes we make or kill us for curiosities we may have. We are free to take advantage of the world around us, and grab a handful of glory from it along the way. As artists, we can look at the world beyond this; examine it, peel it back and decide for ourselves what to do with it. Our inspiration is almost premeditated in that we can create, write, and produce things not from a need for survival but from a position that allows inspiration to ebb and flow slowly.

From this very position we have, rather ironically, come to try and rid ourselves of our very own comfort. The “struggling artist” was once a credential, a cultural mythology, at times attached to a community, that summoned creative power within personal suffering, it has instead become a convenient costume that people throw on to convince themselves, and others, that their creativity means much more than it does.