The Age of Fan Art

Like a lot of people, I get really jaded about the state of high art today.  I feel that a lot of it is affected or contrived or maybe we're all just too post-modern and aware of each other to truly produce something organic. And yes, I realize that was the most hipstery hipster sentence to ever hipster.  Then again, hipsters can't always be wrong.

Having said that, I believe that in ages to come, one of the things that people will study is the rise of fan art.  Fan art is such a phenomena in our culture that people can mass produce a fandom in a matter of days.  On the surface, fan art seems to just be something someone does based off of or inspired by the artistic work of someone else.  To a lot of people's minds, this seems deeply inorganic.  They feel that fan artists are just copying someone else's ideas.

I don't believe this to be true at all. To me, fan art IS a more pure and organic form of expression. Because fan artists (or fanfic writers or filkers  of what have you) are making things specifically based on how something makes them feel.  They are inspired by this work, inspired enough to create art for it.  They allow their imaginations to freely delve into the possibilities of what the characters could be or their motivations that are perhaps not presented by the original creator.

One of the neatest things about the human brain is how we can collectively use our imaginations. When we all watch the same movie/tv show/etc, we all have ideas about it. We make guesses as to what will happen next.  We comment on the  characters.  We feel devastation when a character dies and anger when the show is taken from us.

Our imaginations don't stop there.  When we truly love a story, we will analyze it. We'll seek out others who are doing the same thing. We'll draw pictures of it and speculate about the "what-if's" of it. As this continues, the original world of the creator takes on more complexity.  We begin to love it more, because we now have an emotional stake in it.

When we create fan art, we are expressing that emotional stake in the original work. We are demonstrating our love for the work. Sometimes in a serious manner. Sometimes humorously. Sometimes in the pairing of characters we feel have a lot of sexual chemistry, but that never gets shown in the cannon of the story.

Some people might argue that we should all stop wasting our creative talents and go make our own stuff.  You know what? Some people will. Some of them can do it very successfully because they gained their own admires when they were doing fan art.

But for other people, they may not have the vast complexities of stories and worlds in their heads.  They may not want to venture into new areas.  For them, it is enough that someone else opened up new worlds for them.  For them, those worlds are what they wish to celebrate.