APATHY [fr. apathie]

Apathy is a lack of emotion, motivation, or enthusiasm.
With apathy the artist feel it like a decision, when he is in a state of indifference and unresponsive to aspects of emotional, social, or physical life.
For artists, apathy is a state of being anaesthetised by production, consummation and business.
This make artists function like machines for the cultural industry.
Clinical apathy is considered to be at an elevated level, while a moderate level might be considered depression, and an extreme level could be diagnosed as a dissociative disorder.
The physical aspect of apathy is associated with physical deterioration, muscle loss, and lack of energy.
This state is called lethargy.
Apathy can be object-specific, it can be directed towards a person, an activity or an environment.
It is a common reaction to stress, that when apathy manifests itself as a "learned helplessness", it is associated with melancholia.
Melancholia is neglected exercise.
Artistic melancholia is common among artists.
Art melancholia stems from neglected exercise in art.
Neglected exercise in turn is a common effect of neglected warming up.
Warming up to art is an effective cure against apathy.
Apathy can also reflect a non-pathological lack of interest in things one does not consider important.
Certain drugs are known to cause symptoms associated with or leading to apathy.
Apathy is also very similar to laziness, and may be an extreme form of it.
Detached artists start to be disconnected.
Art-for-art’s sake is lazy art.
Or drunk art.
But definitively disconnected art; art without any social connection.
The concept of disassociation is controversial.
In the practice of Eastern religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, an advanced meditative state has aspects of extreme detachment, though the religion and ritual of meditation is believed to provide proper grounding such as to properly recover from the detachment and to benefit from its experience.
Hence some critics view ascetics or saints as striving for a level of "apathy", which theologians prefer to call disassociation or detachment.