“When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came..."
-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
All art, all true art, is always prophecy. Always. And prophecy helps you see the world as it truly is... which may include some element of being able to see the future. The function of prophecy is that the future may help you see the whole picture.
Art of any kind is soul-crushingly difficult. Through some remarkably fallible sense perception you stumble across something. Something good, pure, beautiful, untouchable, incorruptible. It is hard to communicate the experience if you haven't had it. Something explodes in your heart, quietly devasting. Light gently breaks in, and you realize you've been in the dark your whole life and in fact you never saw anything before this moment. And, so long as you keep doing your art, really do it, you can bathe in that light.
But there's a trick. The material you have to work with is fallen. The people who interact with your art are even more fallen than the materials you work with. Some level of mastery of people and your materials is required. The media is a pain, but the people. The people are the worst part. People aren't just fallen passively, but have actively lied to themselves all their lives, to the point of actual blindness of soul. So when they look at your work are they going to see what you tried to put there?
By default the answer is no. At best you'll typically get indifference or a mild reaction. It didn't touch them because they weren't looking. That's to be expected. Humans don't look at the world around them, and those that claim they do are very good at self-deception.
You want to know how I know?
Because to perceive, to truly perceive, is to be changed.
So if someone goes "Oh cool! That's neat." By default they couldn't have actually looked. And yes, that's demoralizing.
The second worst is a sycophant. "Oh I love your work!" Instead, they made the mistake of seeing you as a necessary part of The Vision. The vision is what matters. Can you develop a predilection of engaging with a specific artist's way of channeling The Vision? Absolutely! We do this all the time! I love Ivanka Demchuk's iconography. I see this icon of Christ being betrayed to Pontius Pilate and I can feel The Vision of it. She saw something about this scene with the eyes of her heart, and was faithful to that vision. I love her craft so much I am going to learn how to do it for myself. Ivanka's work has inspired me to do something for myself. I want to learn for myself.
So, I am not talking about a fondness. I am talking about obsession with the artist. You are not on this planet to turn off your own spiritual vision and worship someone, but to find your way Home. That's hard enough without degenerating into fandom. And it is degeneration. There's a reason why the "fan" hangs himself in this movie. He has made nothing of himself and has become such a bootlicker that death really may be the most merciful option. Certainly not the soul-crushing that happens in the film.
That's not the worst reaction to your work, however.
The worst reaction is one of the fully neutered expert. Remember how I said that the materials of this world, whether they be paint or a damnably thick tome on theology, are inherently rotten, if not actively rotting? What could be grosser than someone who wants to get into that mess? To get covered in the rotting feces that is this world and go "I am very familiar with the smell and viscosity of feces, and so therefore I know you didn't use it right"?
All of this world, at best, is straw.
This isn't to say that technical mastery can't help you point people back to The Vision more reliably. But there is a difference between saying "This is what I think got in the way of helping me escape the fallen world for a minute" and "You failed the fallen materials you were working with", when in reality the materials failed you.
The sycophant and the neutered expert can kill an artist's soul so quickly. Listening to the sycophants will get you pride. Listening to the neutered expert will kill your ability to see The Vision at all. And once those two things happen, you're stuck. You either burn out and collapse in on yourself or take it out on everyone else.
And if you're especially dramatic you'll take all those idiots and kill them all in especially earnestly vulnerable, if not sometimes predictable, movie. And yeah, the movie isn't perfect. I saw the twist coming a mile away. But you know what? So what? it showed me something I needed to see, helped me reflect, and helped me process something that I've been unable to work out for myself for years. The movie did its job. It got me to see something I needed to. I changed, watching it. I saw it.
And isn't that the point of art?
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