This is how you become an artist.

First, you need to start dressing like an artist. Shop at thrift stores. Find clothes that have been thrown out. Females: cut your hair short; males: grow your hair long. Dreadlocks are acceptable for both sexes.

Next, stop socializing with the average Joe. Make sure your friends are hippies, philosophers, or junkies.

To be a truly modern (or post-modern) artist, you have to drop all the traditional subjects: landscape (sunsets), still life (flowers), and portraits (family), at least in the conventional sense. Nudes are still welcome, so long as they border on soft porn.

For the most part your art should be crude. Sex organs make great subjects. So do all items found in a junkyard. Traditional mediums are out of style, so use filth, hair, and blood as much as possible in the creation your piece.

You’ll know you’re on the right track if it confuses your parents and your old friends from high school. Your art should only be understood by artists just like you, living the true bohemian lifestyle.

A few weeks ago I attended the East Side Culture Crawl. The Crawl is a big annual arts festival held on Vancouver’s downtown east side. Hundreds of artists—dancers, furniture makers, glass blowers, musicians, painters, photographers, potters, sculptors, weavers and writers—invited art lovers into their back alleyway shacks, garages, and living room studios. As the promotional pamphlet says, the purpose of the event was to invite the viewer into “the artistic and cultural richness” of a community of artists.

To be honest, I was excited. I wanted to be provoked, challenged, inspired; instead, I was dismayed.

There were a few gems, but most of the art presented at the Crawl was the kind of art the general public hates: bizarre art. There were photos of road kill, drawings of car crashes, and, of course, paintings incorporating decapitated doll parts—all of the usual attempts at being unusual.

The Crawl was a perfect example of all that is wrong with art in the 21st century. I don’t mean to say that art can’t be crude, that it can’t be difficult to read, or that it can’t deal with gloomy subjects. I just don’t believe that these are necessary, or even helpful, in creating poignant art.

The general trend for artists today is to become as isolated and abstract as possible. Artists want to rebel. They want to be strange and obscure. And as a result, they lose touch with reality.

It’s a given that artists are a different breed. But the main problem with many artists who live this cliché lifestyle and create this degenerate art is that they are so focused on being different that they forget what their purpose is: to make great art. Artists should be about the art first, and about being the artist second.

The second problem is that art is a tricky word to define. It is one of those words that is all encompassing; it is as hard to determine what art is as it is to determine what art isn’t. But here are some of the things that art is. Art can be gloomy, shocking and ugly, but it can also be inspiring, uplifting and beautiful. There is still a place for positive art.

One of the greatest aspects of art is that it has no limits. Art can be as meticulous and as ambiguous, as dark and as light, as simple and as complex as you want it to be. Art can be bizarre, but it does not need to be. Art is what you make it