Art! Art! Art!

October 8th 2025

Real artist. Real artist? Don't talk to me about what makes a real artist. Every artist is real. If you've ever had a human emotion and tried to share it with another person, you're a real artist. Everyone can make art. Your yearning, embarrassing teenage poetry was art. The crooked picture of Goku you copied from a magazine as a kid. The flowers you doodled on your mother's birthday card. Art, art, art!

Accessibility? Nothing is more accessible than art. The blind, the deaf, the limbless, the broken, the starved, the infertile, the decrepit, the senile? Have they hummed a tune they remembered from years ago? Have they written a grocery list? Have they asked a priest why they're alive? Art! Art! Art!

Anyone can make art. Good people. Bad people. Saints. Sinners. Toddlers. Have you cried into someone's arms? Have you screamed in grief? Have you dug a gruesome tunnel into your guts with your fingernails, searching for feeling and meaning?

Art is always real.

Have you ever made something out of nothing? Have you ever made something out of something else? Have you kissed? Have you cooked a meal? Have you brought yourself to orgasm? Art! Art! Art!

Art is human! A machine can't feel grief and a machine cannot love and so a machine cannot make art for you. You make art. We make art. Art is everywhere:

My favorites are the hand-painted Snoopy characters in winter clothes painted on wood boards in the neighbors' lawn at Christmas. That poem by a child that says "The tiger is out!" The five notes of a song my husband hums to me, out of tune, key, and tempo, that, when I identify it, is inevitably one of my favorite songs. Beautiful! Precious! Alive!

Don't talk to me about who can make art.

If you can plunge a finger into an open wound and draw a line in blood with it, you can make art.

-Kori Michele Handwerker, October 8th 2025