Thanksgiving Day is a good time to consider a much misused word.

Do you know what sacrifice means? If you haven’t experienced it, then the word is abstract.

To sacrifice, you give up something of great value for something else that you deem to be of even greater value—your art in this case. The word sacrifice is all too often used by too many to spell out an inconvenience. Sacrifice bites deeply and to the core. 

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From the dim twilight of human evolution, there was art before there was the spoken word of language.

Human “modern” culture is more than 40,000 years old; our ancestor not only survived, they made art—necklaces and carvings that transcended the utilitarian.

Remember, cave painters during Paleolithic times of 30,000 years ago did not go to art school to produce their masterpieces.

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As music communicates with notes and pitch that enter the ear and vibrates throughout the body, the fine artist speaks with a visual palette of shape, form, color, and feeling that enters the eye on its way to the soul.

Is it music? Is it art? Who decides?

The widescreen version is that it’s all art, but the scope of that view needs defining—not for comparing, but for an awareness of distinguishing one form from another—fine art or mass art. 

As artist and teacher Robert Henri writes in his book, The Art Spirit:

“Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It’s a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

A creator creates from emptiness; he makes something from nothing. Art that flows from the unencumbered soul is free, and radially different from art made under pressure for a specific purpose. 

Making art that no one wants to acquire, let alone understand is the duality each original artist must confront—for himself. The art viewer already has a hard time comprehending the arts. But acquiescing your power to the critics is no great honor.

In the art business, there is the insatiable quest for the next big thing, the next ism, the next school, the next movement—where dealers and buyers can presumably get in on the ground floor—this is, of course, about money, not art appreciation of the avant garde.

It is not surprising then that much art of our times is diluted with self-referential work of a type that desires—even in earnest—to conceptualize, approximate, and produce itself as self-indulgent banal art that elevates no one. 

Innovation is organic and evolutionary. You cannot force originality—or its appreciation—as if you were baking bread, and even dough needs the proper time to rise.