What a fascinating, wonderfully weird place Burning Man is. I just attended for the first time in five years (my third Burn overall) and to say I that feel newly inspired to create is just a laughable understatement. The conversations, the mind-blowing art, the music, and the time to just sit and think without the distraction of a phone have all helped me to better understand what drives people to put something new into the world, and why I want to be a member of that community of creators.
And it really is a community, even though many of us work on our projects in isolation until the “big reveal,” which many times never actually happens, especially for my fellow writers and me who often feel we are dependent on a publisher in order to share our stories with the world. I personally often think of my creative projects with a wide lens- how many people can I get to read my stories? Of course, I also really hope they love them, but I want LOTS of people to love them. If just one person reads my story and is inspired by it? COMPLETE FAILURE!!!
But is it really? There are so, so many art pieces scattered throughout the Playa at Burning Man, many a long trek from anything else and the only way you would see it is by randomly biking by it on a journey to the trash fence. And these art pieces took months if not years to create! What if just a handful of people passed by one of them, decided to stop, and then took enough time to truly take in the piece. Would that have been worth it to the artist? Of course, you’d have to ask the artist personally, but I’d bet she’d ask a follow-up question, something like, “did my art piece change the way those few people thought of the world? Or of themselves?” And I’d hope that if the answer is yes, then the artist would feel the time spent creating the piece was well worth it.
But what if only half of the people who saw it truly loved it and the rest thought it was just OK or (gasp) didn’t like it? If it were me, I might race right onto the Playa with a U-Haul (of course, abiding by the 5 mph speed limit), grab the art piece, and hide it from humanity. But as people like Questlove and Seth Godin have said, you have to not only understand who you are as an artist and who your creation is for, but you also have to understand who you are not as an artist and who your creation is not for.
Maybe your art project just wasn’t for those people who thought it was OK or didn’t like it. Let’s focus on the half that loved it because it actually inspired them. And really, if I can inspire one person with one of my stories, I really do need to put my ego aside for just a second and remember that creation isn’t always about going wide and getting as many eyeballs on my work as possible. It’s about going deep as well, even if that means just two inspired eyeballs.