"Art is Never Finished, Only Abandoned": A Few Thoughts

It is reputedly an old saying (the kind attributed on dubious evidence to a great many famous figures) that art is never finished, only abandoned--with this, I think, sayable of just about any comparable endeavor. One could always do more.

Of course, it is possible that the time really had arrived to walk away, that the artist doing more would just ruin what they had already accomplished. But one can never be really sure of that, anyone who really cares about what they are doing has some faculty for self-criticism--and often, some element of perfectionism in their makeup--all as they endlessly judge the Platonic ideal in their mind of what they set out to create and what they have realized in material reality and find the latter wanting.

There is, too, the sense of exhaustion that sets in after being deeply involved in something for a long stretch. "Am I thinking of walking away because it's really done," they wonder, "or am I just tired?"

And of course, tired of it--tired of what began as a toy and a plaything and became a monster (as Winston Churchill had it).

As if all that were not enough they live in a society with a brutalizing default mode, which assuming that people are all lazy and stupid endlessly exhorts them to "More, more, more!" rather than encouraging them to think good and hard about when to say "Enough!" The fact that there are always people ready to pounce vindictively on any failing, imagined as well as real, does not help, the bad reviews in which the courtiers and claqueurs of the media world display such delight in tearing apart some hapless authorized victim taking a far greater toll than those laughing along realize, not least by exacerbating every insecurity, every source of that self-doubt which so easily becomes crippling for an artist.

The result is that walking away is not such an easy thing as some imagine it to be--and the artist having a very hard time letting go, all as, I think, much of this can be said of any comparable endeavor.