> Why worry about value? I make art mostly because I enjoy the process

<black turtleneck> Because if you do something to enjoy yourself it isn't art, it's onanism </black turtleneck>

> research your inner reason to make this piece

exactly. Some people never do that, and once you look behind the scenes and try to answer this question it turns out there's no inner reason and it's just paint by numbers. I think we're just talking about the same thing in different terms: your inner reason is the value that I talk about.

> Obviously you tell the story because you want to

I very much abstracted from stories in my comment above - the question I said is necessary to ask yourself is:

* "what story does your music tell?"
* "what story does your painting tell?"
* "what story does your business tell?"

You're right, asking what story does your story tell is a bit senseless. But back to value: really, what sort of person goes to people, and tells them stories with no value what so ever? If I knew that guy and he kept coming back I'd punch him in the face. I am assuming you tell people your stories because you are encouraged, because they find them cool. Here, "cool" is also of value. With time you'll notice more important things in life that can be achieved with storytelling, be it moral support, politics, philosophy. Those are values just like your "cool", but often end up working at a deeper level. Because what's "cool", really? Your cool skateboarder character might end up being "cool" because they're a defiant character who doesn't give up. He might be "cool" for other reasons that meld together seamlessly to just display "cool", but if you analyse it further you can break it down to very deep, fundamental values being displayed, and balanced against his shortcomings.

> In photography/painting, you would pick a main subject, which can be anything you find interesting, images you see or images you imagine or just abstract work

That's waiting for your work to do itself. It takes ages to come up with something good this way. That's like randomly bashing on the piano and trying to come up with a cool melody. And you know what, I did that when I was starting with piano, and I did that quite a lot, and it taught me some things. But it's not the smart way to go. Photography, painting, and music are figurative forms. This means they convey deeper meaning by use of trite objects in intricate compositions or settings. The right way to go is to find an abstract subject or meaning you want to go, and come up with a subject that will convey some or most of it, and then make it work. This makes the difference between a guy with a flickr stream and a photographer who goes out, takes one photo, and it's a hit. If you want to take ten thousand photos and only find one thing which meaning can be assigned to, that's one approach, and lots of people do it. But it's an amazing loss of time because trying to reverse-engineer meaning into one of a thousand pictures is difficult and time-consuming. Better to make the picture work for your purpose, not your purpose work for the picture.

> and then build the image around the reason you find that image interesting.

Exactly. That's the thing. You have to find an image that is interesting. You forgot to mention, but you also have to find an image that other people will find interesting, otherwise you're again just shaking your dick. Art is communication with other people, it doesn't work solo. If you come up with an idea that lots of people share, you can convey it by means of a picture. You can't say "oh, a lot of people share this picture with me" but you can say "I bet a lot of people share this value or feeling or interest with me". That's why it's easier to connect with your consumers if you first think about the meaning of your output, tune it to what they will like, and only then follow this up with form that conveys the meaning. If you first come up with form, and then try to stick meaning onto it, it just doesn't work.

Another issue with retrofitting meaning onto form is that you often come up with fairly stretched analogies, and those end up working for less and less people. If you retrofit meaning onto form, the form will be ambiguous, because there will be angles from which you hadn't viewed your art, and it's difficult to cover all possible analyses of your form and make sure they all end up conveying your retrofitted meaning. If you come up with meaning first, and create a form while keeping the meaning in your head at all times, then in every second of the form's creation you shape it towards conveying the meaning. This has much better, more coherent results.

> Not about whether the image or the work of art has any inherent value, of course it has because you are making it

Is that really so? Nowadays you can easily say 99% of all photography is throwaway. When it started out, it was pretty much art, no matter whether high art or kitsch. Would you say every photograph out there has some inherent value and meaning? Bear in mind that this isn't up to the person who made the photograph, it's up to the people who look at it, and evaluate it. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and if you can't make the beholder see the value, then you fail as an artist.

Thanks for the comment, it was very thought-provoking.