I write most of my stories for their own sake, with audience being a secondary or tertiary consideration after-the-fact. Art for art’s sake, I guess.
“Money, for gods’ sake,” as 10CC cited.
Thing is, as my eldest son the journalist, pointed out, writing of any kind, being the use of words, is always communication, so there is always a presumptive audience. Makes sense.
So who is the recipient of my serious, (non-commerical), fiction? Probably those who resonate with it. Anyone who does.
It’s like carving a sculpture from a stone standing among the trees deep inside a primal forest. Anyone who wanders into that wilderness will perhaps encounter that statue. Each will have a response ranging from apathy through engagement to perhaps vandalism and defacing it. Knocking it over, destroying it, is after all also an audience response.
All of which is between the art and who ever comes across it.
Look at classical art, or art found by archaeologists. It simply is, these days. We encounter and interact with it as we will, and it simply is. Until it is no longer, and even then often memory lingers.
In France, commercial or genre fiction is referred to as journalism, perhaps acknowledging that it is calculated to reach a specified audience. The rest is fine art.
We can and, if serious, should do both. Serious work in popular form is the balance to strive for, if you wish to make a living at it. If you’re kept by a patron or work for money but do your art on your own, perhaps fine art is all you’d wish to do. That’s okay, too.
Making things is better than rearranging or destroying things. Do art.
/ geste
