BWW Blog: Cheyenne Dalton - Quiet Desperation, or The Lives That Men Lead

People want art - that's inevitable. Art is entertainment, and entertainment is consumable, and therefore art is good. People want to watch movies, indie films, television. They want to come to the theatre to show off their cultured lives, and they want to brag about it. People want music to listen to in the car, while they're working, running, sleeping. They want to go to art museums; they want pottery and paintings in their houses. Students want tapestries hanging up in their first apartment, and they want to read books and magazines and comics.

There are, as you know, exceptions to any rule, but the terrible, terrible truth is that these same people don't respect artists. This is something I definitely experience every semester that I continue to be in a major in an artistic field. Every semester, I try to break up the monotony of taking classes in the same building every day by taking at least one class (usually in my minor) outside of the theatre department. On the first day of classes, introductions are necessary. Who are you? What's your major? What do you hope to achieve by taking this class? That discussion often leads to people staring at me (and the few, rare artists who are in there also) in disbelief and sometimes a form of disrespect. Why?

As a student at a generally conservative school, I can say that art majors aren't exactly praised. We get a look of distaste at the very least when we tell people what we're majoring in, and that's not good. I wouldn't look at my friends in engineering and crinkle my nose up at them because I didn't think they were going to contribute anything to society, so why do non-artists look at us like this? In my experience, oftentimes people don't want to pay for art, either. They expect friends to give or perform their craft for them pro bono - and I don't understand that. Isn't that weird? I wouldn't ask my doctor friend to treat an illness for free, so I don't think its fair to ask artists to paint, draw, or make anything for you for free.

For some reason, some people don't want to see artists. They want art and they want to consume art, but they necessarily don't want to see how they're made, or the people that made them. Maybe they think that we should stay in our room, or our studio art class, and make our art and mind our own business. Well, do I have news for you: we don't want to. We love what we do, and we love to get credit for it. So for everyone out there: love your artists.

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