Here is a new Ted Talk I found: "Be an Artist right Now!"
http://on.ted.com/BeAnArtistYoung-ha Kim: Be an artist, right now!
When you were little, I bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art. When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment, many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid.Learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend, or performing a ridiculous skit with friends looking like idiots -- things like that. Or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera. They talk about these kinds of experiences. You must have had such a moment. In that moment, art makes you happy because it's not work. Work doesn't make you happy, does it? Mostly it's tough.
5:37The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying. It's a bit mischievous, actually. "Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired." Right? Why would work tire us if it's in our nature?Playing doesn't tire us. We can play all night long. If we work overnight, we should be paid for overtime.Why? Because it's tiring and we feel fatigue. But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing. They don't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family. Of course, there were kids who had to. You know this gentleman, right? He had to tour around Europe to support his family --Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- but that was centuries ago, so we can make him an exception.Unfortunately, at some point our art -- such a joyful pastime -- ends. Kids have to go to lessons, to school, do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons, but they aren't fun anymore.You're told to do it and there's competition. How can it be fun? If you're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall, you'll surely get in trouble with your mom. Besides, if you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure -- people will question your actions and ask you to act properly.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn't go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves, but with the artist dead, the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form. In karaoke bars, there are always people who sing "She's Gone" or "Hotel California,"miming the guitar riffs. Usually they sound awful. Awful indeed. Some people turn into rockers like this.Or some people dance in clubs. People who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the Internet all night long. That's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side.
10:27Sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with Legos or putting together plastic robots. They go, "Don't touch it. Daddy will do it for you." The kid has already lost interest and is doing something else, but the dad alone builds castles. This shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed, not gone. But they can often reveal themselves negatively, in the form of jealousy. You know the song "I would love to be on TV"? Why would we love it? TV is full of people who do what we wished to do, but never got to. They dance, they act -- and the more they do, they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. "He just can't act." "You call that singing? She can't hit the notes." We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous, not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us. That's what I think.
11:34What should we do then? Yes, that's right. Right now, we need to start our own art. Right this minute, we can turn off TV, log off the Internet, get up and start to do something. Where I teach students in drama school, there's a course called Dramatics. In this course, all students must put on a play.However, acting majors are not supposed to act. They can write the play, for example, and the writers may work on stage art. Likewise, stage art majors may become actors, and in this way you put on a show. Students at first wonder whether they can actually do it, but later they have so much fun. I rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play. In school, the military or even in a mental institution, once you make people do it, they enjoy it. I saw this happen in the army -- many people had fun doing plays.
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