I have an artist in my class this semester.
He has a great story. When he was young, after he graduated college and discovered his major wouldn’t lead to the life he wanted, he moved to New York, studied at the famous Art Students League, and started to make a name for himself as a modern figurative painter. Then, just as quickly, he met his wife, and his kids, and his life, and there you go.
I’ve taught artists before and when I met this new student, I called up a previous client and friend for his thoughts.
My friend has a great story too. He was a Wall Street broker and then an insurance salesman for decades, even though he studied art history in college. He only started painting later in life and just had his first successful year selling his work—using some of the techniques he used to sell insurance. He pointed me to a New York Times article about a third version of this same story, this process of returning to art later in life.
My friend and I came to the same conclusion over the phone. He said to me, “You were the one who told me the Dan Flavin story. You said everything is play until somebody takes notice.”
That’s true, I said that about Flavin: success is doing something strange for long enough that people take you seriously.
Now more people take notice because there are more people at play in front of us daily. My new student entered class skeptical of the Web. He said a gallery owner told him he’d never get a show in New York if he sold any paintings online. On the phone, my friend and I agreed those rules don’t exist anymore because of the Web.
My friend said many galleries in New York that don’t take unsolicited submissions take his because he has that salesperson’s tenacity. He said he also gets responses because no one can afford to say no anymore.
Too many artists and authors and entrepreneurs have become successful while self-publishing or self-promoting to close the door on them. Good ideas by definition come from unexpected directions, so galleries, publishers, and the other gatekeepers can’t keep the locks so tight.
“Oh I’d never accept an artist who sells online.”
“I don’t read books that are self-published.”
“It’s a fluorescent light fixture, not art.”
That’s all gone, if it ever existed. If a gatekeeper has rules, you turn to another. The legitimacy of gatekeepers who can anoint sounds reassuring, but it has always taken that seller’s determination in an artist to both get in front of them and become good enough to be in front of them.
By the time you need them, you don’t need them to anoint you.
There’s never been a path for art, and now everyone is more cognizant and covetous of it. With each new generation since my fellow Gen X-ers, youth has felt more entitled to creative expression and creative change. As they’ve successfully made those claims in their careers and on society, even the older generations have started to take their lead.
Cynics will say the slush piles—the stacks of bad work that obscure the good—are worse than ever. Maybe, but that was to be expected if creativity was ever to expand. As more artists, audiences, and gatekeepers awaken to their imaginations, the only worry we have is more thoughtful output and a higher level of conversation.
People take you seriously when you take yourself seriously and when you work consistently over a greater amount of time. You take yourself more seriously the more you invest your precious time in whatever strange thing it is you do. Now we’re all playing that long game, and we’ll be better for it.
Now the only rules are play and persevere.