0. What are we doing here?
Bottom line: I’m trying to get you to make art. Art within a very broad definition of what constitutes art. Messy human art. Art that might not make you any money (although it might! It doesn’t really matter either way!), but will make you feel better just for having made it.
I don’t want to center myself here, but if I’m going to say all of this, I feel like there’s some use very briefly establishing my background. So: I’m a multidisciplinary artist (and we’ll get to what’s “art” pretty quickly), and have been for over 30 years. My fields are writing, comics, drawing, and music. I’ve never made my sole living on art, but I have been paid for it and a couple of my comics projects have been covered by Twin Cities media outlets. I also have an M.A. in art history from the University of St. Thomas, with a thesis project about self-published comics. So: it’s certainly possible that what I say in this manifesto is wrong, but it at least all comes from direct experience and years of thought.
1. What is art?
To lay cards on the table upfront: I’m not interested in nailing down a philosophically airtight definition of what is and isn’t art. To do so is necessarily to get lost in edge cases that don’t really matter to the bigger picture.
Instead, I think it’s more useful to take a really broad definition. Comics theorist Scott McCloud suggests that art is anything that humans do that isn’t necessary for eating, shelter, or reproduction. I don’t quite agree with this, but only because it could be interpreted to exclude some things that I think definitely edge into art, like cooking; but it’s a good start. The novelist Tom Robbins* posits that art is what happens when a person sees something in their head that they want to see in the world and makes it exist. That’s also not a bad starting point. Maybe think of these two viewpoints as beams of light shining in from two different directions on human experience, with anything that gets caught in either beam counting as art.
*To be super clear: Tom Robbins has some majorly problematic elements in his body of work; but on this specific matter, I think he’s pretty solid.
So: I say pretty much anything humans do that involves creative choices is art, or at least can be. Visual art, comics, writing (fiction and nonfiction), collage, watercolor, music, cooking, woodworking, fashion design, sewing, pottery, gardening, podcasting, you name it. Welding steel shark fins to the top of your car is art. Standing in the front of an auditorium and letting people cut off pieces of your clothes is art. Designing single-player tabletop games is art. Making a video game is art (sorry, Roger Ebert). Criticism is art (you’re welcome, Roger Ebert). Basically, I’m comfortable saying “if you think you’re making art, you’re making art.” That might not be airtight, but it’s close enough to get the job done.
There’s a corollary to this that I think it pretty important and often ignored: as wonderful and crucial as I think art is, it’s not some kind of magic seal of goodness. Something can be art and still be bad. But even then there are gradations. If I draw a stick figure of, say, Wolverine doing a bong rip, that’s arguably bad art, but who cares if I had fun batting it out and other people had fun seeing it? There’s art that’s bad in another sense, in that its existence makes the world a worse place (by my definition, Joe Rogan and Leni Riefenstahl are both artists, after all), but that’s going to be true of anything created by a group as varied and fallible as humanity.
Oh, quick little addition to all of this: if you write fan fiction or draw fan art? That’s absolutely art. Legal ownership of characters by people or organizations is, taking the long view, an extremely new thing in human existence; if Superman existed 300 years ago there’d just be a bazillion different Superman stories cranked out by different people, sinking or swimming on the basis of how well they resonated with people. The urge to create and interact with characters wayyyyyy predates modern intellectual property law. So your creative work with corporately-owned characters absolutely is art; it might be art that you’re never going to be able to commercialize, but that’s beside the point.
2. Why should I make art?
You should make art because it’s fun to do.
You should make art because there seems to be an urge to create embedded in all of us (or at least a lot of us), and taking the ideas in your head and making them exist in the world feels very good and is very satisfying.
If you don’t feel that urge, or if you try making some art and don’t find it satisfying, well, sorry to have led you down the wrong path. Maybe this manifesto isn’t for you, and that’s ok. You should go try to find something that does fulfill you and make you happy! Please just try to be as human as possible when you’re doing that.
You should make art because another of our most fundamental needs, I’m convinced, is to create and perpetuate a self-identity that we can believe in and feel good about. And making art offers several pathways to this. For one thing, “artist” is itself an identity that works for a lot of people (along with all of the many more specific forms that slot in underneath it, like painter or musician or guitarist or game designer or cartoonist or welder or chef or, well, you get the picture). In moments of “who am I?” crisis, you can always fall back on “I am a podcaster [or whatever].”
But even if the manner of your artistic expression doesn’t become your identity, or all of it, it can become a vehicle to help establish the identity that you *do* settle on, and to help tell the world about who you say you are. This was essentially the core of my master’s thesis, looking at three women who used do-it-yourself comics to tell the world “here’s who I am, and here’s my story,” and arguing that this was very powerful. There are 8 billion people in the world, I argued, and I haven’t heard of most of them; but because of their comics I know who these three women are, and I know some of their life experiences, and their stories have become part of my life through this process.
This is subjective, but I truly believe that everyone has a psychological need to find an identity that they can cling to. In America in 2025, we get a lot of cultural peer pressure to hang that identity on our jobs, or on the stuff we buy or consume. I submit that this is sort of like trying to live on a diet of pop tarts; it might keep you going for a while, but it’s not very good for you for the long term.* Think of the people at work whose whole personality is built around maximizing stuff and hitting quarterly goals. Does that seem like a good way to be? Wouldn’t it be better to define yourself as a sculptor? Art might break your heart now and then, but it’s never going to lay you off.
*as I’m fond of saying, and as I’ve seen reinforced over and over in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, no matter how much you love your job, it’ll never love you back.
You should make art because to do so in America in the 2020s is to perform a defiant act of humanity.
The dominant forces of our culture are profoundly hostile to messy, weird humanity. There is massive cultural peer pressure to conform and consume, to look at everything through a business lens (how many parts of life now get discussed in terms of their return on investment?), to quantify and gamify everything, to be efficient and boost your productivity, and that sort of thing.
In that kind of landscape, making art is an act of defiance. Painting a landscape (or drawing Wolverine doing a bong rip) creates no shareholder value. It doesn’t boost productivity. It just means that you wanted to see something in the world and made it happen, and had some level of fun doing it. It prizes human enjoyment, both in the act of creation and (potentially) the act of interaction by someone else with the finished work. This, again, is subjective, but I think we desperately need more of this human-scale stuff.
There’s an important side point with this: one of the few limits I think you should actively put on your creative work is “don’t use generative AI.” (the other is “try not to hurt people or make the world worse with your art”) The whole point of art, I think, is the act and process of creation; farming that out to software gets rid of the purpose. But, you say, what if I’m just using it as a tool for my greater creative purpose? Say, I have an idea for a graphic novel but can’t draw—why not have Midjourney do the art for me? I’m still making choices when I craft the prompts and accept or reject the outputs!
I still think you shouldn’t use it. Gen AI as it exists now is incredibly resource-intensive. It’s also largely trained on material (either text or visual art, depending on the program) whose original creators never consented to have fed into the things; it’s all built on theft of the work of your fellow artists. And remember what I was just saying about forces in the world that are hostile to messy humanity, and who want everything to be bottom-line-driven? Those forces are literally the same people and organizations that are currently trying to jam Gen AI into every facet of life. To use their tools is concede something important to them.
As I type this, MS Word’s AI tool (which I haven’t bothered to go turn off yet, but I’ll be doing so shortly) keeps suggesting rephrasings to make things more concise, and in each case it wants to turn a sentence into some kind of bland business-speak. Writing is condensed thinking, frozen in time; I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let some corporate robot do my thinking for me.
3. What do I have to do to be able to call myself an artist or a writer or a musician?
You have to draw something, or write something, or start making music. That’s it. Weld shark fins on your car. Doing the act is enough, especially if you keep doing it.
It doesn’t matter if someone pays you or not; “writer who gets paid to write” is just a subset of “writer.” It doesn’t matter if other people see your work and/or like it. “Artist with a bunch of Instagram followers” is just a subset of “artist.”
What matters is that you do the work, and put some time and thought into it. The rest is details. If you can tell yourself in good faith that you’re a musician, then you’re a musician. If someone wants to argue, that’s their problem.
It doesn’t matter if no one else ever likes or even sees (/hears/reads/smells) your work. It can have value just to you and that’s totally fine.
4. How do I get started?
You just start. It’s that simple. You decide you’re gonna start doing it and then you do it.
That might not be easy! It’ll probably be hard at first if you’re starting from zero. That’s ok! That’s fine and normal! There’s a clip floating around the internet where Ira Glass talks about how hard it is to start creative work because there’s always a gap at first between the vision in your head—the vision that appeared when you got excited enough to want to make art—and what you’re capable of doing at first before you develop your skills. That gap is real, and it’s frustrating, and it never entirely goes away.* But you learn to live with it, which is easier if you know the phenomenon is there. And the gap does shrink, at least.
*Seriously, I know accomplished people who’ve been doing their artistic thing for decades who’ll finish some kind of fantastic, cool work, and moan about how it doesn’t live up to the idea they had in their heads. And I’m sympathetic, of course, but a lot of the time I’m also frustrated because they don’t see that no one else has access to the vision in their head, so the rest of us are just engaging with the thing as it exists in the world, and that thing is rad as hell on its own merits, and they just can’t fully see that because they’re hung up on the vision in their head. The struggle is real, and ongoing.
There are many bad things about the world in the 2020s, but one of the small upsides is that I don’t think there’s ever been a time in human history when so much information about starting any conceivable type of artistic practice has been readily available for free or for very cheap. The internet is awash in tutorials; even if most of ‘em are crap, the raw numbers are so huge that you’ll find a good one eventually.
And one of the joys of all of this is the satisfaction of seeing your skills grow. Or, often, of realizing after the fact that whoa, your skills have grown like crazy in a way you didn’t even notice at the time. If we’re looking for glorious humanity here, these are moments that deliver.
One other thing: I do think it’s important, as soon as possible, to establish creative work as a daily (or close to daily) habit. Just get yourself used to doing it, and get to where it feels weird if you don’t. The exact path to that depends a lot on the specifics of your life, but in my experience there’s usually a way. Maybe it means doing a quick drawing every morning before breakfast; maybe it means getting an external keyboard for your ipad and working on the novel for a little bit on your lunch break. Again, the specifics are up to you. But there’s probably a way if you look for it.
For me, there’s a lot of upside to this—I just mentally feel better on days when I create, and having it as a habit means that I almost always get *something* done, and over the long haul that’ll get you a big pile of work (and enjoyment, and improvement, and all that stuff). But it’s not all upside; it does mean that I can feel kind of crappy on days when circumstances keep me from working, and you do have to be careful not to let your creative habits get in the way of important relationships in your life. You have to be careful about these downsides, but I think in the end it’s worth it.
5. Do I have to learn the rules?
The short answer: yeah, to some extent, even if it’s just to learn which to ignore.
The longer answer: so you know how we were just talking about frustration stemming from a gap between the vision in your head and what you’re capable of producing? Just about any creative discipline I can think of involves some rules of the craft that, if you master ‘em, will help narrow that gap. So you should try to improve your craft some, both because the act of mastering skills can feel really good and because having a better skillset will get you closer to being able to execute the vision in your head.
Also, sometimes knowledge of the rules can open up new visions of what’s possible for new work. In music, my songwriting changed a lot and got a bunch more expansive when I learned triads and other alternate voicings of chords on the electric guitar.
That said: do not ever let your skillset stop you from trying to execute an idea (unless your chosen artform involves food and you might end up poisoning somebody). It’s the humanity in art that makes it great; your singular humanity will find its way into your work regardless of your skill level. The choices—many of them not conscious—that you make in terms of what to include in the picture, how light or heavy to draw the lines, what elements to emphasize or ignore; these choices are your personality expressing itself through creativity, and all technique can do is amplify this thing that’s already there.
And like I said earlier, a lot of the time, it’s qualities of the “imperfect” work that diverge from the vision in your head that will appear to other people. Work can and very often does succeed exactly because of its imperfections! Those “imperfections” often reveal the humanity that you put into the work, the specifics of your vision and so on.
As another cards-on-the-table moment here, I’m saying all of this as a person who came up in punk rock and DIY comics; so my chosen fields are ones that explicitly prize emotion over technique. That’s very common, but I know it’s not universal; I guess if classical music is your thing, the situation is different.
But even then: the process of being a creator is one of continual growth. And growth is only possible if you give yourself permission to make “crappy” art as a growth stage. Even if you’re in a discipline that prizes technique, you have to be ready to move through the era where you don’t have your technique all the way down yet before you can get to mastery. Sometimes you have to paint 20 messy paintings to get them out of your system to get to the one you want. That’s ok. You still got the experience of doing 20 paintings.
6. What does artistic success mean?
In the most fundamental sense, that’s up to you. As with the whole thing about artistic identity, you’re successful if you feel like you’re successful.
I think it’s useful, though, to be clear-eyed about the world you’re doing your creative work in. You might think “I’m a success if I get a novel published.” That’s a pretty common benchmark for writers. But here’s the thing: the publishing world is a set of interlocking gears of contingency subject to market forces and the whims of people in publishing who range from wonderful to dipshit. So deserving books wind up not getting published all the time; and absolute dog’s breakfast books get printed every day. Suppose your literary taste—which, to be clear, is fully as valid as every other human being’s—points you towards writing something in the vein of Charles Dickens. Which was a form valued by the publishing industry 200 years ago! But not now. It’s not your fault that culture changed, and it doesn’t mean that your vision is invalid. But it does mean that pinning your notion of success on an external factor, especially one that involves markets, is a dangerous proposition that can lead you to upset.
I wish we lived in a society that was kinder to creativity and creative people. But we don’t. We didn’t create this society (I guess this manifesto represents an attempt to steer it in a slightly better direction), but we’re stuck in it. And looking at the society we live in, I just think that on a bunch of different levels, tying market success or even getting paid to your concept of success is setting yourself up for unfair trouble.
If you can get paid for your work, that’s fantastic! It can be a great feeling. But there’s no shame in not doing it for a living. That’s just an outgrowth of a society whose priorities are such that—to take a favorite example of mine—the 500th best project manager in your city earns somewhere around $100,000 a year for doing it while the 50th best drummer has probably spent more money on gear than they’ve ever earned from playing.
To put it another way: I think we live in a world where it’s a lot more reasonable for art to give you an answer to the question of “what the hell am I doing with my life? Why am I even here?” than it is to hope for it to pay your rent. That sucks, but that’s where we’re at.
There’s no shame in having a day job when you live in a society that’s hostile to art. There are downsides to it, god knows, but it can be liberating; if you want to make weird comics about the sex lives of French fries, you’re a lot more free to execute your vision if you don’t rely on your comics to make rent (another side of this: no matter how much you make creative work a habit, there will inevitably be times where it’s just not flowing for whatever reason, and it’s nice for these stretches to be a minor bother and not an existential threat). If anything, the longer I’m around, the more I see how many creative industries rely entirely on exploiting the hell out of the people doing the creative work.
Instead, I think success has to be rooted in the act itself; you’re going to be happiest over the long haul if creation is its own reward for its own sake. This isn’t a very hard mindset to cultivate, really; you’re making this stuff because you want to see it exist. So you just have to come to see that yes, there’s value in seeing it in the world.
All that said, I do think another form of success that can feel good is validation and respect from your artistic peers; I really felt like I’d accomplished something when the comics journalist Tom Spurgeon casually mentioned me as a cartoonist. “If Spurgeon says I’m one, than I am one,” I beamed at myself. When other people working in your field accept you as one of them, that can be a great feeling. And if community is another thing that we’re short on in 2020s America, a group of artistic peers is one of the best communities available right now.
7. Where does this leave us?
Fired up to make something, I hope! Think about something that you think would be cool to exist in the world. A drawing, a story, a song, a trebuchet in your back yard. And then: get out there and make it! You’ll probably be frustrated at times. But you’ll have fun and learn and grow in the process. You’ll probably learn something about yourself, And in the end, you’ll have something you created.
You are only going to be alive once. You get a handful of decades. And that’s pretty good! But it’s finite. I can almost promise you that whenever the end comes, you’ll have been glad to have carved out some time to make stuff. Get out there and get making the messy, weird, imperfect stuff that can only come from you!
GET OUT AND BE A GODDAMNED HUMAN!