Do It Ugly: On Bad Art and Civic Duty

Creation does not need to be productive. Art does not need to be good. Your first draft, your ugly website, your clashing colours or broken layouts are not a moral failing. These are all needed beginnings that start every worthwhile thing ever made.

This is a lie designed to keep you silent. To keep you consuming instead of creating. To keep you scrolling instead of building. To keep you buying instead of making.

It's Boxing Day here in Canada, and after celebrating Christmas with my family I am now I'm writing this. Another silly article. The act of showing up to write this silly article is the point. Not whether it's good. Not whether anyone reads it. The showing up itself is the civic duty, the spiritual practice, the resistance against a world that wants you to believe your worth is tied to your productivity.

There are a few things that stop people from starting. The biggest one? [**The taste gap**](https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/29/ira-glass-success-daniel-sax/). This concept, popularized by [Ira Glass](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/our-staff/ira-glass), host of *This American Life*, describes the painful reality every beginner faces:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you."

A lot of people have much better taste in things than they're capable of executing and creating. They're disappointed that the thing they've created is no comparison to their favorite artist/creator/dev. Or even what's in their mind's eye.

There's a common platitude that you need to be bad for awhile at something before you're good at it.

But, really, **who cares?**

Your bad is not a universal bad. "Bad" is not a moral failure or a waste of time. There is inherent worth to any human creation, especially moreso now in an age where anybody can effortlessly produce [AI slop](https://blog.brennan.day/the-piss-average-problem-ec2a2dd6f5ad) that superficially surpasses a human's first attempt at something.

**[Start ugly](https://forartssake.art/2021/08/24/start-ugly-david-duchemin/). Do it ugly.** Make conventionally "bad" art. Fill up sketchbooks with drawings nobody would buy or double-tap. Make confusing websites, use clashing colors, violate norms, `<marquee>` everything. What's stopping you?

The creation of art is, largely, liberation. Untethering yourself from the ego and (usually extremely loud) inner-critic that holds you back often. There is a spiritual component to this.

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