Life Is Hard. Art Helps | Liana Finck | TED

92,696 views ・ 2024-01-03

TED


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00:04
The ways of the world often baffle me.
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I sometimes wonder if I missed the memo about the most basic things.
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What are you supposed to make for dinner?
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What do you talk about in an elevator?
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Why do people cut in line?
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How do you leave a dinner party without being rude?
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Or do you leave it all?
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["Why are you still here?"]
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(Laughter)
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My tendency to see the world like I'm from outer space
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was a bit of a liability when I was a kid.
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True story.
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["What's a noogie?"]
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(Laughter)
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But it's been helpful in my career.
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I'm a cartoonist.
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When I first started making cartoons for The New Yorker about a decade ago,
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I kept my ideas light and quirky.
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And please shout out if you don't get any of them,
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I'll explain.
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(Laughter)
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["The synchronized swim team quits"]
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I didn't draw anything too personal.
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["Unicorns do exist!"]
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I mean, personal for someone.
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I figured I was too specific,
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too hard to relate to and read, possibly, too female.
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It took a breakup.
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(Laughter)
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["I know there would be a time
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I could wear them without destroying my feet."]
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(Laughter)
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It took a breakup to get me to start drawing more autobiographically.
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The pain I was feeling, although objectively pretty run of the mill,
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was impossible to ignore.
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[Tunnel of love]
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I knew that drying was my strongest problem-solving tool.
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So I decided to diagram what I was going through.
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[Tunnel of love. Just kidding. Wall of death.]
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(Laughter)
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By making these drawings, I could see how my ex and I had hurt each other.
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And move on.
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Onto other breakups.
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["Again?" Pit of despair]
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(Laughter)
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Drawing from my own life was a revelation to me,
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not only because it helped me understand myself better,
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but because it made me see for the first time
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that people could relate to me.
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Now that I had this amazing tool,
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there were so many problems I wanted to solve with it.
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The problem of scheduling.
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[Work | Family / Friends]
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The problem of too many things happening all at the same time.
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[ "I'm having a birthday party! "I'm visiting New York!"]
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The problem, relatedly, of time.
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[Childhood / now]
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And finally, dating again.
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(Laughter)
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There's an endless amount to say about dating.
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(Laughter)
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There are, of course, problems
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that can't be summed up in a single drawing.
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For these problems, you need many drawings.
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One more complex problem I have is with God.
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I'm Jewish, so I'm talking about the God of the Old Testament.
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My problem with God isn't actually a big problem.
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It's just, I don't know, it's stayed with me.
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My problem with God is that he's too confident.
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(Laughter)
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For me, creation is an act of solving problems,
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of figuring things out.
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God already seems to have everything figured out.
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He strikes me as more of a king than a creator.
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And I'm not sure you can be both.
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As an experiment,
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I decided to remake the Book of Genesis as a graphic novel.
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My version of God is not confident.
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And maybe not coincidentally,
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she's a woman.
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It surprised me how few changes I needed to make to the original text,
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which is sparse and ancient and lends itself well to interpretation.
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For example,
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the Bible opens in this mysterious, moody way
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with God floating aimlessly on the face of a dark, mysterious void.
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In my version, I have her floating this way
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because she's feeling despondent about her limitations as an artist.
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She's made this messy, wet, mixed up dark first drafts of the world,
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and she just doesn't know where to go from here.
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My version of God doesn't know exactly what she's doing,
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but she draws a horizon line, and things start to fall into place.
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She banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden,
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not because they disobeyed her,
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but because, by eating the apple and becoming wise,
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she feels they have outgrown the world she created for them,
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and she needs to let them go.
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She scatters the builders of the Tower of Babel,
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not because she's threatened by their power,
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but because, like any introvert,
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she needs her privacy.
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(Laughter)
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When she destroys the world in the story of Noah,
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it's not because she's incensed with mankind,
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but because she's incensed with herself.
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She knows she could have done a better job when she made us.
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06:04
My adaptation of the Book of Genesis
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is a creation story full of false starts and absurdities.
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But it's a creation story all the same.
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One in which a self-conscious woman,
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even though she worries and makes mistakes,
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is nonetheless a successful, committed artist.
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When I finished my book,
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I did feel a new connection to the God of the Torah
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and a new sense of belonging to my religion.
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I also felt a new sense of belonging,
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period.
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It's lonely being someone who has no idea how to act normal.
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But it's profoundly less lonely being that person
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in a world created for her
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by an equally awkward, self-conscious God.
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These days,
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when I worry that I won't know what to make for dinner,
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I remind myself that God wouldn't know either.
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07:07
(Laughter)
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This picture is giving me anxiety.
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(Laughter)
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It's like, literally, I drew it from life.
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(Laughter)
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This gives me the confidence
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to embrace my cluelessness and just wing it.
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Thank you, thank you so much.
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(Cheers and applause)
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