Affiliates

[Atlas]

What is the role of writers and artists in society? Do they have a definable role? Can it be fixed, described, characterised in any definite way? Should it be?

Personally, I can think of few things more terrifying than if writers and artists were charged with an immutable charter of duties and responsibilities that they had to live and work by. Imagine if there was this little black book - a sort of Approved Guide to Good Writing - that said: All writers shall be politically conscious and sexually moral, or, All writers should believe in god, globalisation, and the joys of family life ...

Rule One for a writer, as far as I'm concerned, is that There Are No Rules. And Rule Two (since Rule One was made to be broken) is that There Are No Excuses for Bad Art. Painters, writers, singers, actors, dancers, film-makers, musicians - they are meant to fly, to push at the frontiers, to worry the edges of the human imagination, to conjure beauty from the most unexpected things, to find magic in places where others never thought to look. If you limit the trajectory of their flight, if you weight their wings with society's existing notions of morality and responsibility, if you truss them up with preconceived values, you subvert their endeavour.

A good or great writer may refuse to accept any responsibility or morality that society wishes to impose on her. Yet the best and greatest of them know that if they abuse this hard-won freedom, it can only lead to bad art. There is an intricate web of morality, rigour and responsibility that art, that writing itself, imposes on a writer. It is singular, individual, but nevertheless it's there. At its best, it's an exquisite bond between the artist and the medium. At its acceptable end, a sort of sensible cooperation. At its worst, it's a relationship of disrespect and exploitation.

- Arundhati Roy, The Ladies Have Feelings, So ... (The Algebra of Infinite Justice).

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Thoughts?

[Kherezae]

^{I've always thought that being a writer would be one of the most limitless careers... you can write about whatever you want, there is no dress code, there are no fixed hours... but it's also very hard, very limited in another way. With the whole world and more to choose to write about, how do you choose which story to tell? Because writing is all about choosing to leave out the unimportant parts, only telling the story that needs to be told. And to be a successful writer, you have to connect with an audience, which is an enormous task in itself. Unlimited freedom is a difficult thing because you have to learn to limit yourself -- otherwise you will get nothing done. That is why so many writers get writer's block or get nothing done, myself included.}

[Zylaa]

The role of an artist or writer in society is whatever the writer or artist wants their role to be.

[Ted]

The role of an artist in a society would be to capture the values, beliefs, etc. of that society, while at the same time adding their own personal touch to it. The amount of that personal touch they add is what makes them an artist.

Maybe.