The threat of convention

 The first obstacle that the creative mind faces in its development, is convention. The creative spirit wants, above anything else, to do things its own way - it wants to learn from examples to be able to develop, but it does not want to be chained by what many other people think or want, it want to be free to delve into all the possibilities, in all the varying options, that appear in the space of its imagination, and to be free to accept and to reject anything entirely according to its own inspiration and instincts.

What is convention? It is custom, and a social thing, making communication and exchange possible without the aggression of knife and club. It is a gentle theatre of manners, ideas, behaviors, which are the most easily accepted by the average mind, and which lead to bridges of understanding, compromise and identity confirmation - the human being is a social being. There is, in principle, nothing wrong with this. But for individual artistic achievement, this can be a hindrance: of course the creative person has the same social needs as anybody else: the need of acceptance, of identity confirmation, of support, of feeling that he shares meaningful values. But not on the condition that he sacrifies his innermost convictions or ideas or inspirations.

So, what happens in the development of the creative psyche, is a long trajectory where it has to overcome its perfectly natural social needs to be able to realize its potentialities. The sacrifice this entails, can be very painful and harming on a personal level, depending upon the degree of conventionality of the environment. The very thing that has to function as a bridge between people, becomes an impenetrable wall, cutting-off the normal channels of human connection. The artist can still maintain a social network which nevertheless fails to understand what he is doing, which creates a sharp cut between the outside and the inside of his life - two spheres disconnected. 

The price for individual achievement is thus isolation and loneliness. Hence the absence of great artists in our time - that is, either they don't exist because the price is for most people in our spoiled and materialist world simply much too high, or we don't know about them because they are behind that impenetrable wall that surrounds them and prevents them from emerging into public space. Hence the suffering of the greatest artists, even if they appear to be socially integrated, and the deprivations of the world: it is bereaved of something it never came to know, let alone understand.

This means that convention is always the deadliest threat to art, also today where convention simply has taken other forms than in the past but functions in the same way.