Risking Banality for Authenticity

My Art Making

Mindset: Prioritize personal integrity and genuine connection over the social pressure to be impressive or entertaining. Embrace your true, unfiltered self, accepting that being genuine may sometimes appear mundane, unpolished, or unconventional in your art.

There exists a tension between presenting a curated, "polished" persona and revealing the raw, often messy, reality of human experience. Have the courage to reject artifice—embrace honesty, openness, sincerity, and truthfulness.

Risk Vulnerability: Authenticity requires vulnerability, which can feel threatening because it removes the protective masks often worn to avoid judgment or rejection.

Reject "Performative" Perfection: While social media and modern culture often push for a "perfect" image, true authenticity involves accepting flaws, doubts, and mistakes.

The Cost of Conformity: Holding back one's true self to avoid being banal, trite, hackneyed, mundane, pedestrian, insipid,  commonplace, clichéd, dull, flat, ordinary, prosaic, stereotypical, or vapid can lead to exhaustion, stress, and a lack of deep, meaningful connections.

Authenticity as a Choice: Rather than just a state of being, try to see authenticity as a continuous, active practice of aligning your internal feelings with your external actions.

Context Matters: Radical authenticity can sometimes produce work that lacks empathy. Everything you create doesn't need to be made public.