Adversity and Art
There cannot be one without the other. In my opinion, the best art is meant to challenge you in a way. Whether it makes you think about something differently, or challenges your value system, as a whole, it makes no difference. To be clear, by “best art” I mean the kind of art that impacts you. This type of perception can, and should, be different for everybody since we are all unique beings with our own memory banks of experience.
Adversity
What is adversity? A quick google search will give us a definition of, “Difficulties; misfortune.” If we solely go off of this definition then adversity would seemingly be a bad thing, at first glance. Who would wish for misfortune upon themselves?
As children, we are inundated with movies and stories of heroes who faced obstacles that seemed insurmountable, and still overcame them. This is why they are heroes — because they overcame their adversity. There’s a reason we as a species, despite different cultures even, gravitate towards these plots and are entertained by these kinds of stories more than anything else. Half of the all time top 10 grossing movies are either Star Wars or Avengers.
Perhaps this is the trick, though, and adversity should be looked upon as a good thing; or, rather, the ability to overcome adversity. We know that, in the end, despite everything that happens, that the heroes are going to beat the good guys. Most of the time as we are going through adversity, we’re not sure if we’ll even win, or what “winning” might even mean for us. The important part about life, is that we are each given our own unique set of problems depending on our different life experiences. We may find people who go through similar problems, but no two people are the same.
Despite all this, art offers the best opportunity to relate our adversity, and express the battles present within ourselves, and possibly others.
Art
What is art? If we are going to examine the relationship between art and adversity, then we need to understand what we are examining in the first place. A google search for art is a bit more ambiguous than for adversity, “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”
Somehow this doesn’t seem to encapsulate everything that the word “art” represents, except for the “expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” Art seems to have a purpose above this, almost like we need it. It’s art that glorifies our every day motions and paints our lives in a divine light. It’s one of the reasons that hip hop is so popular — a lot of hip hop songs feature stories of artists overcoming adversity to making it big, “If you escaped what I escaped, then you’d be in Paris getting fucked up too.@
Art also has the ability of intertwining itself with culture. Different cultures around the world use art to typify their tradition and express to the universe, “This is who we are.” This seems to happen at all levels of communities — I remember in middle school small cliques of 5–6 people even identifying themselves as unique by listening to certain kinds of music.
Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, either as an artist or as a consumer of art, what art is to you. As difficult as it is to just say that something that seems so universal is, in the end, subjective, there seems little else to say about the sheer amount of different experiences from different types of art there are out there. I mean, a fucking banana sold at Art Basel for $100,000. Art could be anything to anyone.
Art and Adversity
In my personal experience, my art and music is inspired by adversity I have gone through in my life. My favorite pieces of art are similar, where artists shed light on their personal struggles. I believe that these kinds of pieces are the most powerful because it shows an example of someone overcoming, or, adversely, someone succumbing to their struggles.
In this way, adversity is necessary to art. Not the definition of adversity that we used in the beginning of this article, mind you, but on recognizing the importance of the overcoming of adversity. Even if artists use a song to represent despair, we are allowed a greater context as time goes on to see the continuum of an artist’s work, and how this adversity was either maintained, overcome or succumbed to. The process of overcoming is what we see in the artwork.
This is why the artists who use their traumas to provide courage for themselves in their art are so powerful. The woman who is writing about her traumatic experiences has reconciled them to the point she can speak on them, and this is inspiring to us. The singer who croons of lost loves shows that there is indeed a life after heartbreak, if only we can endure as the singers appears to have done. We are only lost when we use our adversity to define ourselves and our identity. We are more than what we have been through.
Thanks for reading.
As always,
IG: @gabrielknowseverything
