Just a short a reflection on the nature of weirdness, today, from the jumping off point off…
Photography.
(You thought I was going to say Vice Presidential debates, right?)
It’s occurred to me that with copious current technology (like iPhones, and Instagram, etc) all of us can be photographers.
Not good ones, necessarily, but we can all attempt to capture a real life image to keep for later.
Photos are plentiful. So, what rises up above the noise?
Two things:
1. A unique or usual perspective
2. Weirdness
What is meant by the word “weird” anyway?
It’s something that catches off-gaurd or seems “not quite right”. Weird can be interesting or ghastly.
Most of all, weirdness provokes thought or response. It engages us somehow.
We need it. As people and as artists. Otherwise we somehow fall asleep…in all the wrong ways.
At the Story conference in Chicago, Erwin McManus said poignantly,
You don’t have to have hope to create art, but you have to have hope to create beauty.
Art can be both weird and beautiful.
Sometimes art needs to be ugly. It serves an important purpose. But in “ugly” themes we shouldn’t stay put, because then we arrive at inaccuracy. Lasting and excellent art (and creative expression) is where beauty and accuracy intersect. Not asethetic beauty, mind you. Something more. Something deeper that exposes underlying ideals of goodness or truth in its many facets.