Art Is Mold on Spoiled Food

I think courage has to do with the ability to listen to yourself, to be self-aware, and to follow what you feel inside. In my case, I don’t think that those who do courageous things are breaking rules that don’t belong to them. I believe courage is something deeply tied to your own nature, to your identity. 

To be aware, you need self-knowledge. To be brave, you first have to know who you are. Otherwise, you’re just being stupid.

If I, with my lack of physicality, tried to be brave through the body, I would crash. I would collide with my total incapacity to handle the concrete. I would end up imitating something I’m not, following rules from a world that describes courage as something physical. But for me, for who I am, that just doesn’t make sense.

I’m outside that system. Totally unintelligible inside that game made of physical strength, success, concrete achievements. My courage has to do with ideas, with imagination, with vision. With choices. Choices that are often born from a refusal to accept prepackaged, established realities, sold as inevitable. There’s a deep pleasure in breaking those rules and looking where I’ve been told not to look.

And usually, I find something there. Something I hadn’t been told. Something others might not see. Those things feed other things I had already seen. I put them all on the table, and now it’s a table full of fragments that have nothing to do with each other. But I don’t hide them. I leave them there, even if it's messy. And in the meantime, I play. I build. Often things that have nothing to do with what’s expected.

Sometimes, they make sense. Sometimes someone else arrives. And there, a real pleasure is born.

The hard part is trying to move others, to inspire them, knowing I can’t force them. 

Everyone has their own time, their own rhythm, their own need to choose. You can also choose not to be brave, to live your life as it is. And that’s okay. But for me, it doesn’t work. If courage is missing, boredom comes. And from boredom, dissatisfaction.

I find myself in front of big themes. Sometimes I shouldn’t even face them, but I do anyway. I start reading, studying, and understanding. Seeing if they concern me. If they don’t, I watch them from a distance. Maybe they still serve me, in my own way. And maybe it takes me years. 

Like this difficulty I have in communicating, in this strange space between introversion and extroversion: inside, a mine; outside, the urge to scream into a microphone, to play guitar in my punk band. But normality, calmness… that I can’t express.

There is no calm. There is revolution.

A silent, evasive, invisible revolution. But it’s there. Inside, underneath. It has to do with social, economic, and global transformation. Deep transformation. And there, inside, is huge potential. A space for experimentation.

An artist, if they’re not a hypocrite, knows this. Art is born where the world is falling apart. Art is like mold on spoiled food. It grows where something is ending. Where there’s crisis, instability, mutation. That’s where art lives. And we’re there, now. There’s no patronage. There’s decomposition.

And so art expands, takes unexpected paths. Often people think art is dead. But art dies when society is stagnant. When instead society is trembling, art comes back. 

Art feeds on death. It’s terrible to say, but that’s how it is. Great stories live off death. Because death is life. It’s everyday. And we spend all our time trying to avoid it.

But there’s a voice inside. That keeps speaking. And that’s where the artist finds their courage. Looking at that pain. Not pretending. Not creating beauty for beauty’s sake. Not making millions of pointless copies of Impressionism.

Courage, at some point, is also about breaking that. And then breaking something else. And then breaking again.

Not being banal. Because banality is really unacceptable. Looking with coldness, with distance. Mixing things. Using the tools of your time. Not because you must. But it helps. Because how do you tell the story of your time if you don’t live through it?

You can also choose to stay outside. You can be a Pre-Raphaelite. But if you want to tell the world, then you have to use its tools. And that takes another kind of courage.