So in other words if your creative effort is so narrow that your work never shines, you might not be creating "art" after all.
Makes perfect sense to me. The process reveals the motives.
Makes perfect sense to me. The process reveals the motives.
Contrast that with how much more common it is for people to suffer for their art because of their pretensions.
Perhaps I'd suggest it's your effort to make the work shine, not just in the actual creation of the work, but in the contextualization of it as well. (This is connected to your point on narrowness—if your vision is narrow, you can't contextualize.)
The most literal example that comes to mind is Virgil Abloh feeling the need to prove what he was making was art, and relying on his research and the work of his inspirations as evidence or "proofs." He discusses further here: https://youtu.be/zKYp1t0-xYw?t=1313