Make bad art. Now.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been creative. I recall a little me—with big cheeks and a horrendous side part I thought made me look so cool—sitting next to some obnoxious, sticky-handed boy, drawing an eye in the corner of my notebook. I would spend hours watching DIY channels on youtube, and making my own dollhouses out of cardboard and glitter glue.

Nowadays, I spend my Sundays rotting in bed, rewatching my favourite TV shows, and writing shitty poetry with cliché metaphors. I’ve explored numerous art forms, from songwriting, to scrapbooking, to extravagant eye makeup. I think I’ve dabbled enough in the domain to consider myself an artist.

According to the Cambridge dictionary, art is an activity through which people express particular ideas, which means it is inherently human. Nevertheless, I feel that I’ve grown into an art machine, that I’ve somehow managed to suck the soul and pleasure out of my work.

I am always exhausting myself, analysing conversations as they happen, thinking of clever ways I could reference them in a song, flooding my notes app with every sliver of ideas that come to mind, hoping I’ll get back to it in some boring afternoon and come up with something original.

Occasionally, I get the urge to create, write decent music and questionable prose. I more often than not give up about halfway through the project, rip the pages off of my notebook, and ultimately have no oeuvre to be proud of. Chickening out of ideas has kept me safe from the possible realisation that I’m not as good as I thought.

I think I’ve scrolled my way into thinking I must draw, sing, and write all the time, and that it has to be great, in order for me to be a realartist. This mindset makes art seem more as an obligation rather than a hobby. It’s sad, because the freedom of it all was what made it magical to me in the first place. Maybe making art felt better then because I didn’t care about being good.

But now I wonder: how am I supposed to be ‘good’ if I don’t give myself the space to fuck up from time to time? Progress depends on our ability to allow ourselves to be bad long enough to get better.

It’s okay to be bad, and loud, and wrong. May my nail polish be streaky, and my bangs crooked. In the age of AI, chasing perfection will only make you dissatisfied. We will never be as efficient as chat GPT, but that shouldn’t stop us from creating. May your drawings be asymmetrical, your writing contradictory, and your songs corny.

Making bad art is not only okay, it’s necessary. The idea that art must be good to be worthwhile misunderstands what art is for. Art is a process. One of exploration, graphite stained hands, and learning. Bad art is often where that process begins. Even the most successful musicians—you know, the ones teenage girls have posters of in their bedrooms—have at least once written a god awful song.

Don’t be afraid of being unsettling, of breaking the norms, of following your gut. Playing it safe is boring, I’d choose ‘bad’ over tedious any day. And you should too.