Real Artists Ship

On pandemics. the post-apocalypse, art and becoming a selfish old dragon.

Sep 12, 2024

No one knows what art is. It’s best to be clear about that upfront.

If you tied me to a bench and waterboarded me until I spat out a working definition for art, I’d probably say that it amounted to the magical act of abstract conjuration - the taking of an idea and bringing it into the world in such a manner that other people can understand something about it. A heightened means of communication reliant on the manifestation of the cerebral in the shared part of the world.

Of course that would include all manner of designed objects that are not art - computer mice, automatic gearboxes - so we probably need to add on the requirement that it be of no practical use.

And then we’d need to account for l’Art Brut - art produced with no expectation of or desire for an audience.

And then, even if our definition were accepted, the inevitable artistic imperative would be to concieve of an art that defied it and - were such an effort successful - our definition would be immediately disproved. It doesn’t work.

No one knows what art is. No one ever knew.

Among those who didn’t know what art is, Steve Jobs was probably among those least qualified to offer an opinion. Practically speaking, his idea of artistic practice seemed, predominantly to involve the purchase of very thin, very expensive computers.

All the same, among the many aphorisms attributed to him, there is one that’s been running round and round my head for months:

Real Artists Ship.

He wasn’t claiming (I assume) that Real Artists have an unhealthy investment in Hermione boning Draco once all that stuff with Voldemort has blown over. Shipping, in the parlance of the tech visionary, is the act of declaring a thing finished and releasing it into the world. Getting it out of the door. Abandoning it. Real artists do it, apparently.

By reliable accounts, Jobs used to enjoy setting out the themes of working retreats by summarizing them in aphorisms which he referred to as ‘Quotations From Chairman Jobs’1. Real artists ship. I think I agree with that. Meetings are brilliant, everyone loves a meeting, even if its only them present. Meetings sparkle with all the things we could do. The sticks of rock we could have made, the operas we could write, the squares we could freak out. But shipping is what counts.

I remember half knowing someone whose band had been rehearsing for five years but who had never put any songs on the internet, waiting, he said, for the record deal that the songs deserved. I despised him for it. Put them all on the inernet! Right now! Money be damned! If you must get a record deal then write more songs later, better ones. That, I think, is my intuition for how the world should be. Real artists ship!

But it was a younger, dare I say spunkier, man who originally thought the thoughts which make up my worldview and none of it seems as straightforward as it used to.

I don’t really have imposter syndrome - in many ways I have the reverse of it - I find my mental health chipped away at and my confidence undermined by my suspicion that everyone else who is successful is an imposter. Still though, that question - what makes someone a real artist? - nags at me all the time.

I think I am one - or, at least, it is very important to my sense of myself in the world that I am one and the psychic damage of doubting this assertion is wounding and immediate. But it is an ever present niggle.

How, after all, does one prove that one is a real artist? Income? Where does the threshold sit for that? For a long time I’d have said that difference between a real artist and a hobbyist was that the work brought more money in than it cost to make. I still like that distinction, but it is obviously flawed - Van Gogh is coming at me, brandishing an ear furiously in refutation. Even leaving him aside, the border undermines the capitol: does real artistry descend upon an artist the moment they move their account into the green? Clearly not.

It can’t be the quality of the work, either. Quality is like temperature - even if everyone agrees about the balminess of a breeze - the warmth is a matter of consensus, not reality. The agreement of humans subjectively experiencing temperature says nothing about the vibrating atoms that produce the effect. Quality is essentially incomplete as a theory - a work can remain unaltered and yet bounce around all over the map of ‘quality’ solely as the cultural norms of the audience change.

Relatedly, the realness of an artist is definitely, 100%, not conferred by the approval of institutional bodies created to determine who is and isn’t a real artist.

Record labels, academies, talent shows, sponsored prizes for album of the year that cost hundreds of pounds to enter - these are all efforts to enclose art and reduce the abundance of it for financial and cultural capital gain. Those pricks have about as much claim to authority over the realness of artists as the revolutionary cultural committes preferred by other systems of resource allocation. Stuff them all.

But still, though. How do you prove it?

Real artists ship.

I used to be good at shipping. The Indelicates released 6 studio records between 2008 and 2017 - that’s decent, one every 18 months, more or less. Just long enough for people to be, like, ‘huh, The Indelicates haven’t released an album for a bit have they I wonder if…’ BAM, album. REAL.

Sicne then though, it’s all gone a bit wrong. There was the pandemic. That was a thing. And none of us are OK, really, are we? Before that, 2018 was the year of the Total Personality Breakdown and I’m still not sure where all of me is. 2019 we had a second child and, as it turns out, the equation of additional children is not linear but exponential. Two children is LOADS more than one. And then everyone got locked in for a year and forgot how to exist in relation to other people.

Julia - my wife and bandmate -says that it’s everyone who feels like this - that none of us have dealt with the trauma of what happened at all. I think that’s right. This actually is the post-apocalypse that we are living in. It is less dusty, less radioactive, the institutions we rely on for security are continuing drearily on in a way that went unimagined by the lore-builders of Hollywood - but for all the simulacra of a civilisation plodding on one year at a time, there’s a hollow and haunted sense to the world now, a listlessness.

It is as if we all saw, for a second, the mountebank operating the great and terrible Oz - the cogs of his machinery insisting us into office buildings and business parks, the crank he uses to force children into classrooms, the magic lantern casting promises of a greener and more pleasant retirement - but now the curtain has been replaced and the Emerald citizens are all insisting we go just back to normal and never ever mention it: the great and terrible truth.

Sometimes in a film, just before the climactic battle, one of the heroes quits. They go back to their previous life and they perform some menial task that once gave them a sense of meaning but they do it angrily and you can see on their face that the second-to-last war they must fight is the war within themselves. It is a moment that demands to be resolved - they will choose inevitably to return to the plot and when they do, it will mean more to us, we’ll relax. Probably the camera will wander off and focus on some side conversation, then the suppporting cast will say ‘well, let’s see what [hero[ thinks!’ and the camera will pan back to the mangle or chopping board or truck engine to find the hero has gone, vanished back into the story.

That’s where we are - heading back to settle our debts with Jabba the Hutt because we never said we were joining the rebellion and we’ve got a life to get back to. Sitting in our cockpit, looking conflicted, mulling the pregnant guilt. But we are here forever, frozen in a state of narrative tension. My shoulders never seem to drop. Whenever I notice them, they are up around my ears.

Somewhere along the way I stopped shipping. I released weird solo records on a strictly limited basis and made very sure not to attempt any kind of a splash with them. We produced a musical (Paradise Rocks) three times with different casts (and each time was glorious and bruising in different ways) but the thing you’re supposed to do with musicals - stick with them and build them into something more than playing to a few hundred people in the fringe by telling people in the world about them - exposing them to the harshness of the open seas… that proved impossible. I have tried to set sail but every oar stroke away from the harbour has felt heavier and more overwhelming.

Most of all, like a selfish old dragon in a mountain, I have created treasures and hoarded them. I wrote a novel - I really like it - but I haven’t sent it to anyone. I finished the cast recording for Paradise Rocks on the second attempt but have felt too paralysed to release it. There’s more.

Most of all, the seventh Indelicates studio album has taken seven years. I am disgusted by that fact. That’s longer than The Stone Roses took to release The Second Coming, longer than Elastica took to release The Menace. Oh god, what if we’ve made the Menace? It’s too long. It’s a length of time that demands to be mentioned. It’s a weight on top of the record. What on earth can have taken the time? 47 minutes of music isn’t enough - it can’t ever be enough to match seven years of nothing. I don’t delude myself into imagining that there’s any great clamour or expectation for a new Indelicates album - but I am us, it’s our whole life. It won’t trouble the charts, but it troubles me.

Practically, it has been very difficult to record how we used to. Two children mean that the long hours Julia and I used to spend just messing around with music haven’t been available. Being in a band with your wife is great, for the most part, but God, sometimes you need a whole day to get a vocal recorded the way it needs to be and we just haven’t had one, in all this time.

That’s an excuse though. Really it is terror. A horror at the exposure of re-emergence. I am so very much older now and so very diminished in my once confident fury at the world. Have we ceased, in these end times, to be real artists? Real artists ship.

The Beatles recorded Please Please Me in a single day. That’s how you do it - bash it out, move on, what’s next?

Real artists ship.

The camera pans back. Ableton Live is open at an empty desk.

Avenue QAnon by The Indelicates will be available to listen to and preorder on CD and Vinyl by the 21st of September.

Real Artists Ship

On pandemics. the post-apocalypse, art and becoming a selfish old dragon.

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