Ive Been Thinking A Lot About Art And Success And The Way That Were Trained, In A Way, To Be Insecure

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and success and the way that we’re trained, in a way, to be insecure about our inadequacies. There’s very much this idea that if you’re not on your way to becoming the great leading artistic visionary of our era, you’re wasting your time. I would like to say I’m above this line of thinking, but I’m really not. I have insecurities and frustrations and annual artistic crises-of-faith at a pace of what seems like twice or thrice a year. 

But, I don’t think that artistic success is a make-it-or-break-it proposition. Doing well enough can be a form of success. I’m not exhibiting work on an international scale (although I’d like to be), and it feels like I’m laboring in obscurity a lot of the time, but I’m actually working in my industry (as an arts professor) and I have my own studio. 

I’m not solving world hunger and I don’t live in a Japanese RPG world where there can be only one chosen one. I’m making objects of aesthetic intrigue. I’m not where I want to be at the moment, but I can be patient and keep working away, and if I never quite get there, is it really the end of the world? 

These are taking shape.

I'm thinking about making a huge post on what artistic concept is and how to develop it once I am done grading finals. I'm getting a bit (read: massively) tired of it being treated like a nebulous and mysteriously mystic thing, by students especially.

The “to be molded” shelf in the studio, also known as “Don’t touch it stupid, you’ll break it”

Something on my mind for all my students who follow my blog, and to anyone else who finds it meaningful:

Don’t let anyone else tell you what you have to like or care about. Don’t let other people determine your tastes for you. It doesn’t matter if it’s other artists or teachers or parents or people in places of authority. Your interests are your own. As a younger person, you’re often going to go up again the tastes, tendencies, cultural biases, and indoctrination of people, particularly older people, who believe that your youth means that you don’t know what “good taste” is. 

Your tastes develop over time, yes, as you deepen your interests and delve more thoroughly into the stuff that interests you. That’s the keyword there: YOU care about it. You are the up and coming taste-maker. It’s not your job to make art history categories for what you make; art historians went to school for a long time for that privilege. 

If you’re in a class or a program and you’re butting heads with teachers telling you that your interests are worthless, that’s hard. You have my sympathy. I’ve been there. You’re not getting the direction you need to really find your own footing. I promise you that it will get better if you don’t let yourself get discouraged and you make time to pursue your own interests away from the piercing eyes of insecure instructors. 

Your choices do not need to validate their choices. If you don’t want to go to grad school right out of college, don’t go to grad school. If you don’t want to be a portrait artist, don’t be a portrait artist. Make work in class to get by and in your own time, try to take what you’ve learned and apply it to what actually gets you excited. If you’re in a fine arts program and it feels like everyone around you hates illustration and comic books, but those are your lifeline to feeling a sense of joy, don’t let those people trample all over that. Make your own work and treat it like a quiet rebellion. 

Teachers are people too, and sometimes, they can be petty, judgemental, or closed-minded. Their authority doesn’t make them right.

It begins.