Some art is completely lacking in substance. It's like the artist, the authors, have simply decided to say something, anything. I find it endlessly frustrating.

So many songs sound like pieces put together to sound like a song. The lyrics are words strung along, the mangled corpses of poems puppeteered by grinning fools, nothing more. These wannabes cut and paste the strife of others, the passion of real humans, and lather it in enough goop for it to stick to their dull lives, with just enough of a bump poking through the poorly stitched mess so they can say they didn't infringe on the copyright. It disgusts me. It is not art, even; it is the performance of art. Sounds that rhyme, miming emotion in verse, saline solution flowing from glass eyes down Botox cheeks. The notes are all the same, too. It's like an endless echo, 3 minutes each way 'round the chasm of creativity.

Books aren't much better. How many characters are just each other?

I can't help but feel that I want to write something that will make someone carve their own heart out. Is that a weird thought? Something that will inspire true emotion, something that will convey true emotion. I suppose it doesn't need to be unique, just striking. Unfortunately, I fear I may not have it in me... My own emotions have always been rather muted.

I wore my dark corduroy trousers, today.

Is art the act of expressing emotion, or the act of eliciting emotion?

The act of expressing emotion in such a way as to elicit emotion?

Does it matter if the emotion expressed is ungenuine, if the emotion elicited is as intended?

As the audience? No! I suppose, if you mean to say something meaningful with your art, to communicate a particular, then it would be at the very least unfortunate for the emotion elicited to be one other than the intended; I mean as the artist.