Art is a tool

Art is a tool

Art is a tool.

It's always created for a particular purpose - with a specific goal in mind.

Even if you make art purely for the joy of creation, never even showing what you make to anyone - then it's a tool to help you feel that joy!

Lots of people try to fight against this - "art doesn't need to have a purpose!" - but even if you do it to feel a lack of purpose,  then it's still scratching an itch.  You're probably using it to escape the overwhelming sense of purpose that you have elsewhere in your life!

But if it's a tool, what can you use it for?

Well, some people use it to make money, others to keep themselves busy and others use it to impress their friends.

Every day, millions of people across the world use it for thousands of reasons! Therapy, grieving, relaxation - you name it. It's very versatile.

It's probably one of the oldest tools we have - the earliest humans likely made pretty things from flowers and plants and rocks around the same time as they first made the first made farming tools and weapons.

And it's not just a normal, bring old tool, it's actually really fun tool to use - creating it is absorbing and engaging, in additon to being useful. If you have an opportunity to use it for something, you should!

I personally am using it to inspire myself to learn how write software that gets AI to do fun and impactful things - to understand how to work with the technology that will come to define this century.

The idea of making beautiful, weird things using tools like Stable Diffusion and Dall-E is so exciting to me that it makes learning how to code easy. After years of procrastination, I'm finally getting good of it - all due to a desire to create good art.

I'm using art as a tool to learn a specific skill and to understand the future. I'm also using it as a tool to rebuild confidence after after my startup failed. Learning new skills and then using them to make things you're proud is a really great way to rebuild self-belief!

I also hope to use it as a tool for self-expression and explanation - with a bit more practice.

Does this make me an artist?

No, it just makes me an unemployed person trying to figure out how I'll spend the next few decades.