Artists must be allowed to make bad work
austinkleon.com
austinkleon.com
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
Hugely useful if you are starting to get into something new or are young and frustrated that your X isnt as good as you think it should be.
From this philosophy, I gained a lot of confidence in just diving into anything I was interested in, regardless of how embarrassing my early attempts ended up being.
My parents were the "artistry isn't a real profession" kind, and even seeing me persevering with all of these crazy constraints (like having to make music with an Intel Pentium II with no sound card) wasn't enough to convince them. After about four years I stopped making music altogether and I regret it so much. I always wonder what would have happened had I waited for the era that we're in today. Granted, my life trajectory still went in a great direction, but I miss making music.
It is crazy how quickly I've improved in the last few months. Some of it is mechanical stuff, some of it is knowledge stuff, but I think the biggest thing is just knowing that every two weeks I'm going to chat with my teacher, which keeps me motivated to keep working on things and also just gives me a reason to play.
the talent never goes away. you can pick up right where you left off
> "You know, the whole thing about perfectionism.. perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in— it's actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is." -- David Foster Wallace
https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beg...
Then they went to a bad school. Chuck Jones, the animator, wrote in his biography that when he went to art school, he was told "Everyone has ten thousand bad drawings in them. Our job is to get them out of you as fast as possible."
Today, the writer's gold standard is publication. In fact, many readers say they won't read anything that hasn't been "published" by a publisher.
But the incentive of a publisher is money and sales, which means they will search for things that sell in volume, or handicap the writer's work so that "it sells." And how the publisher guesses if something will sell? They will look for things that have sold in the past, they have no other way. And they will do it even if it crushes the bibliophile's soul of everybody at the editorial, because they got bills to pay. And it results in...more of the same. It's not art anymore, it's commercial fulfillment, and it's not enjoyed to the point of being remembered.
There is one good thing about fiction writing though, it's called beta-reading. It's a thing authors do, but it's also a great opportunity for readers to contribute to a story, to make it more to their liking. If you ever are feeling hyper-critic of a piece of contemporary fiction, as an alternative to cancel-bombing the author because they produce "bad work" and have the daring of publishing it on their own, consider doing some beta-reading.
Remember, Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was traditionally published and an amazing commercial success[^1].
There's the entertainment side, which is basically market-driven - as in creating work for a market. If it's unsubtle and relatively crude, it lives here. It can be a very polished and professional kind of crude - superhero movies, the best pop productions, and so on - but it's not subtle, complicated, difficult, or understated.
There's the cultural landmark side, which is about unusually powerful and fluent work that changes culture itself in some way. [1]
Publishing pretends to be the latter but it's really the former. It's thrilled to make a lot of money from entertainment projects like Dan Brown, Fifty Shades, and the rest, while somehow maintaining the impression that the entire industry is Culturally Important.
[1] This mostly means white well-educated upper middle class culture. But even so.
But over time, you get better. Practice pays off. Playing with other people of varying skill levels pays off. You stop doing covers and start making your own compositions. You learn to improvise.
And, you encounter catalysts. It could be a recording by someone else. It could be a musician who lets you do things on your own instrument that you never thought possible. It could be a club or even a clothing store that becomes the center of a local music "scene."
No one remembers Jimmy Page's skiffle band, John Paul Jones' 1965 studio sessions with a half-forgotten R&B singer, or Robert Plant's and John Bonham's first band. But when those 4 came together for the first time in the summer of 1968, BOOM!
I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. Of course, if you put regular human beings on a pedestal and make an Idol of them then any minor misstep will be unforgivable.
So, in the arguably creative work of creating new software, you are allowed to ship mediocre software at the start, but you do risk making a bad first impression that may be difficult to recover from.
But on the other hand, if you never ship the software product, your software can become outdated by the time you eventually release it, or you can put it off indefinitely and miss out on growth as a developer. So, there can definitely be a balance between releasing a product too early and making a poor first impression, and waiting excessively to polish a product, to the point where the software becomes no longer relevant or outdated.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...
It might be partially about attention, but the problem with fine art is probably that it needs to be something novel or reach beyond the mundane somehow. Most people can keep doing more or less the same mundane work with mundane results every day and it's still passable or even completely fulfills expectations. You can't really do that when the work kind of by definition is expected to spark something or speak to its audience.
That's when anyone at all cares, because they add value in that way alone. No house is built, or disease is cured, or road is laid by their work.
They choose to do something that is failure-prone, ill-defined, and almost by definition isn't intrinsically useful. They cannot be surprised when that turns out to have problems as well as advantages.
P.S. I have just realized that I have the "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon in my library. Proves the point of being an artist I guess :D
Most people's GitHub pages are full of this kind of junk. And in this case, "junk" is absolutely not a pejorative. It's necessary, and it can show growth if somebody's looking for it.
But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocratic).
It was also one of the justifications behind copyright, to give artists more stability.
That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.
And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical.
There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object.
[0] I'm assuming you're not Jeff Koons. The problem with HN is that, sometimes, you are actually chatting to a celebrity in the field without knowing.
> There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object.
Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.
Or to put it another way, most art sold isn't in urinal form.
I've never "understood art", but when you phrased it like that it makes perfect sense. To me, provenance just isn't interesting. So I judge the pieces as they stand in front of me.
- Do I find this aesthetic
- Do I find this historically/culturally interesting or significant
- Do I find this a good investment
The problem is that people don't always make it clear which one they are judging by and end up talking past each other.
I think for actually regular people threshold is in hundreds or tens. Art isn't very expensive on the low end. Paintings by no name authors don't cost much at all.
So if you're an artist and people value your name, regardless of the product it's written on, you don't have the OP's problem. The problem described only applies if the consumer can get some other art that gives them equivalent satisfaction.
No it doesn't. A free market assumes that there are no constraining influences on trade except supply and demand. With the possible exception of a working contract law system.
Free markets happily allow for people to make buying and selling decisions for any reason they choose. If it happens to be for a non-fungible asset, no matter how pointless it may be to other parties, so be it.
Efficient markets imply restricting assumptions on fungibility, so that there can be a meaningful fair price, but it's not required in general.
And that seems to be what OP was complaining about, the lack of this security for artists. Unfortunately, the copyright (like most other property) today has been mostly captured by rentier class, so it no longer provides these protections for most artists, if it ever really did.
So I was really just pointing out this connection between OP's woes and copyright.
People are competing against other humans, who need rest too. Hence, everybody rests, and things work out for everybody in the free market scenario.
And even in hunter-gatherer societies humans evolved past that. I mean, this guy got sick for a month, let's not feed him anymore, he's not competitive enough. Surely humans would flourish with that attitude!
The most creative I've ever been was when I was writing new work every day. MOST, maybe as much as 95%, of what I was creating was just okay. 4% was something that could be developed into something good. 1% was actually good.
That meant in 100 days of writing 95 of those days I would feel like a failure if my measure of success was creating something good or useable. I had to shift my thinking so creating something was the measure of success and creating something good only came from creating a lot and seeing what actually stood out.
If I was putting all of that work online right away I'm positive the negative feedback, or entire lack of feedback, would have been discouraging and I would have stopped.
For instance, we could very well say that, if you are primarily making art as a product, you are like a vendor in a marketplace. And, as a vendor in a marketplace, we consumers don't need to nurture you, or be patient with your failures. If you make a bad batch, we just move on to the next vendor selling a similar product.
The definitions of art and artists have changed a lot since 1969. We used to have this concept of selling out, and if you engaged in it, you weren't a serious artist to a lot of people. We don't really have that concept today, at least not in the same way. You also might not have been considered a serious artist if you worked in a popular medium: popular music, television, comic books, etc., all of which I think most people consider valid art forms today.
I'm not saying this was the right way to think about art. I'm saying that's how it was. And while I don't know a lot about David Sylvester, I see that he was a fine art critic and curator, so I am assuming he might have been talking about a particular kind of artist when he said this.
One of my pet peeves is artists (and journalists) setting themselves apart as a “high priesthood” and claiming things for themselves specially which should apply to humans in general.
Yes, artists should be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times because humans must be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times.
Yes, creativity and freedom is important for artists because creativity and freedom is important for all humans.
Yes the government should not be spying on journalists, because it shouldn’t be spying on people in general.
1) A suggestion is made for the readers and to the society to change how the judge and think about artists.
2) Writers tries to convey new norms, forbid judgement.
What do you think the writer tried to do here?
So while an artist should be allowed to have down periods, it also shouldn't be surprising if people move on. We're not looking for needles in haystacks anymore, we're looking for needles in a stack of needles. There may be value in coveting needles and hay from a particular artist, but that's an intensely personal decision to make.
If you get stuck on words, expressions, or idioms and constantly interpret them wrong, it usually means that you can't parse context well. If the expression "must be allowed" bothers you in this text, your OECD literacy level is most likely below 3.
It's easy to fix if you start reading more books, you start to improve.
If you can't parse the context from the writing, there is no context for you.
Do you not see the irony here? Commenters, too, should be allowed to have bad takes
And that is assuming it is genuine misunderstanding and not, like, typical nerdy "I refuse to actual engage with those idiots from other fields, better just make up something".
Well, if it is common in English to refer to the situation when the public opinion about you is allegedly shaped by your last work as "not allowed to make bad work" than indeed I do not know English on the third level of OECD literacy. But that sounds like a very peculiar trait of English, and a very deep ideological commitment incorporated into the language on a level that I couldn't expect.
This is where you are wrong.
It is not based on the idea of freedom. The point of the article, and the title, has nothing to do with whether someone is legally allowed to make bad art, or has some fundamental human rights, that are being infringed on, related to freedom.
Instead, the purpose of the article, and the title, is that because artists are more in the public eye these days, this extra scrutiny on every single piece of work that they do, has anti-creative effects on artists, and this is bad.
The only person who invented a fictional narrative about freedom, was you. The actual point of the title, and the article, was actually pretty obvious though, if you aren't looking for some gotcha.
> that I couldn't expect.
It was actually very easy to understand the article, if you start from the idea of "This article author isn't completely stupid, let me think for a second as to what such a person might be attempting to say, assuming they do not believe the obviously untrue statement that making bad art is illegal".
So, explain what does any of that has to do with “not being allowed” to do something?
What it has to do with that, is not that artists are literally prevented by the law from making bad art.
Instead, it is that artists should be able to make bad art, without suffering significant negative consequences from doing so.
So, you should interpret the statement as being "artists must be able to make bad art, without suffering significant negative consequences for doing so"
That is the intent of the title.
This is what "allowed" means in this context.
It means "it must be possible for them to do this, while not suffering significant negative consequences."
Because by "allowed to" what it means is "to be able to do so, without suffering significant negative consequences."
So, that would be the definition of "allowed to" that is being referred to, which is both true and justified.
Can you imagine what seeing a nice painting of a person was like when you had never seen any other kind of artificial image in your life besides handmade ones? It was probably mind blowing.
Photography has probably totally destroyed our relative reaction to visual art, like someone who eats way too much sugar trying a sweet apple.
But now we seem to be running on cultural fumes in this area. It’s as if people still bought hand cobbled shoes for millions of dollars and displayed them pretentiously.
Not knocking the skill involved, being a high fidelity human rendering engine takes a lifetime of dedication as well as a base level of natural talent which very few possess.
Maybe I am exaggerating my perceptiveness, but being shocked by Caravaggio paintings is not at all uncommon.
The machine may threaten to usurp the mass market but the few, skilled organics will always, hopefully, have artisanal works to sell.
What is interesting and telling is that they showed a 'name' like Caravaggio, and not any of the countless contemporary painters who are every bit is technically skilled as Caravaggio was, and perfectly capable of emulating his style. If the classical visual style was still relevant in itself, every art gallery would be showing off those contemporary artists.
The fact that you can't really think of any artists or ever see their work out in the world kind of proves my points.
However, I've not got a horse in this "classical is overrated" race.
The first to do something are remembered, those who come after must be significantly better or different to be recognized. If someone wants to see Caravaggio's style, they are likely to simply see Caravaggio - it's just name recognition, nothing to do with the "relevancy" of the style itself, whatever that means (Popularity? Or a self-fulfilling justification for whatever style the art world elite is pushing?)
And there are in fact newer artists with name recognition that painted in a representational style (but not the exact same style), e.g. Dali, Frazetta, Giger, Beksiński.
Art is more than technique, the music performances that move us are very often not the absolute highest level of virtuosity. Photographs were incredibly common in my lifetime, but I was still very strongly affected by paintings on books, album covers and in museums.
Further, non-representative visual art has a rich history. You merely have to look at the amazing art produced out of Islamic aniconism.
I think we have to understand its meaning and impact on a societal level and determine its usefulness or uselessness[1]. Not all art is useful and not all art is useless but some are one or the other.
[1]Very broadly defined and not focused on economic value, though being a. Inner dial success is also valid.
Painters at one point were rock stars. Just like today's rock stars are social media stars and not a group of guys playing guitar/bass/drum/vocals.
Artistic mediums have their moment in time and then become niche, historical and retro once their time has passed.
Marble sculpture is no less amazing than in times past. That mediums time in the sun though passed a long time ago.
Just like if you go to an art gallery that arranges the paintings in period rooms, it completely obvious when photography became an up and coming medium and its effect on painting at the time.
We could point to a number of contemporary artists that are worth millions of dollars for whatever they are known for - you might even consider them 'rockstars', regardless of how myopic I find the term - but headlines that make it onto the "4 big websites" is not the same thing as being irrelevant.
For every "Picasso" you can cherry-pick from history there's a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Ai Weiwei, etc - All worth millions or, at the very least, "Rockstars" in their own right.
The idea that Marble Sculptures in Ancient Rome or whatever had passersby standing in amazement compared to today is not accurate. People walking into whatever temple for whatever God they were visiting would be just as bored by the marble back then as you are of marble now.
What's really changed is that accessibility to these things have exploded. More people than ever have access to Art, Art Tools, Art Education, and new Art Mediums. "Art" is in no-way dying out. Focusing so much on the "Medium" is missing the forest for the trees, honestly. (Which is to say, modern technology and socio/economic trends have a bigger effect on the use of Marble than "Marble as a medium", whatever that means. Sculpture is alive and well, I promise you)
This is a little bit rambly because your post just kinda says, "Art changes over time" and doesn't, in my view, have a wide-enough vision of the "why" but this is all to say that like, as far as this thread is concerned, Visual Art, if anything, is omnipresent in our lives - not less relevant than in times past. If anything, the presence of "Rock Stars" is an indication of too few talented people, instead of what we have historically which is an ever increasing number of extremely talented people. I just don't know how we can say Painting is less relevant now when more people than ever are doing it lol.
What gives you this idea? You don’t think that constant exposure to having one’s human recognition instinct stimulated artificially has a tolerance effect? Isn’t it a bit strange that people put so much effort and resources into e.g. statues despite finding them as boring as we do today?
On the other hand, the statues were often painted, so they looked more interesting than the bare marble we see now.
No, I don't think it strange at all that people put so much effort and resources into Art. The creator of the work gets a different kind of satisfaction than the people viewing it. These reasons vary from person to person but I've always liked my Highschool's Motto "Art for Art's sake". So it makes sense to put effort into creation. Personally, I love narrative and so when I'm creating sculptures or art of any kind I'm considering the narrative that goes into it. The effort is to achieve the narrative while considering tone and taste. A Nightmare Before Christmas would not be the same movie if it were all rendered as naturalistically as possible.
I'm not going to pretend to know the entirety of reasons people have for liking their spaces designed, but we do like shiny things and people can be particular about their environments. Yeah, it might be most efficient to put people into perfect cubes but I doubt the emotional well-being of most people would be met by this kind of environment. So, on that basis alone we have a reason to put effort and resources into decorating our spaces.
I don't really understand your second sentence. I'm not sure what "Human recognition instinct simulated artificially" even means. Do you mean our ability to recognize humans? Or our ability to recognize anything? Its a little short-sighted to view the whole of "Marble Statues in Ancient Greece/Rome, etc" as "Activating, artificially, our Human Recognition Instinct". Like, not only was a majority of the Art from that time lost/destroyed, and not all of the statues were of people, but those statues were humongous. David is like 17 feet tall. No one is going to mistake him for a human. Humans from antiquity weren't that different than the ones from today, at least no biologically/evolutionarily. So it'd be the same for them as any memorial statue is today - they fade into the background (While still providing some aesthetics, mind you)
What you're really missing by pulling out this single quote is something I touched on later in the post - Focusing on any individual "medium" is myopic in the conversation of Art's Cultural relevance, and the thread you sparked is just as marrow-minded. We're definitely in a period of time absolutely saturated with Art but we are by no means running on cultural fumes. Maybe the spaces you occupy are dead-zones but that's a personal choice IMO - Its beautiful and full of culture out here.
A lie promulgated by modern art as justification for forcing out all prior art styles and aesthetics, but nothing could be further from the truth. Have you ever seen photos like the following?
https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdzislaw-beksinski/untitled-1976
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajikazawa_in_Kai_Province
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Aivazovsky#/media/File:St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)
https://www.bonhams.com/zh-cn/auction/27421/lot/413/kimura-b...
The amount of colors is just flooring and mind bending.
Perhaps a course in art history would help you understand that visual art has never been solely about image reproduction. Even cave paintings were allegorical. My goodness.
When the reality is that people are still very much interested in the extent of human prowess AND other folks (often overlapping) are interested in the extent of mechanical prowess (We call those folks engineers and they are much closer to Art enjoyers than not).
There's no doubt that Photography had an affect on "Peoples" idea of "What is Art" or "What do I value in visual Art" but... so does everything? Being extremely wealthy or extremely impoverished can destroy a relationship to Art. Its not so linear as, "All people care about is the ability to render images realistically"
I feel like I could type a novel around this concept but I'll leave these seeds planted, for now.
B) What an artist produces with a rendering engine will be starkly different from that of an amateur with the same engine. Art isn’t medium or technology.
If this were true then the Impressionism movement would never have come after the Renaissance. But it's not, there's more to visual art than just reproducing what we see with our eyes.
Even the best athletes have "bad days at the office" (just yesterday, the #1 tennis player in the world lost to a guy ranked #133). Why should artists of any given medium?
To the extent the artist is acting as a true artist, the public has no say in what they may or may not do. In that sense, their work is neither "good" nor "bad."
But to the extent the artist is acting as a commercial entity – one who intends to sell a consumable product – the public has every say in the value and merit of a piece.
The artist may do whatever kind of work she wants. The company may not.
And finally, when a customer buys a piece of art, they're not just paying for that piece but also for the time that the artist spent finding themselves :)
Come to think of it, maybe even laws should be tested in a laboratory first. We cannot emulate the human society fully, but some unwanted effects could be detected this way anyway.
As an example, religious conservatives will brainstorm a lot of issues that are bound to rise (according to them) from gay emancipation. In practice, these failed to manifest.
I'm pretty sure same religious conservatives will claim that issues they saw did come up. While the other extreme would just shrug off the same issues as non-issue. Different people value different things... More at 11.
For some professions that might include running some projects at a smaller scale, as a simulation or even as role play exercise
First, establish that a drug binds to the target in laboratory conditions (relatively quick). After that, test the drug in an animal model. After that, proceed to clinical trials, which are phased (phase I, II, III) to first establish whether a dosage exists that is safe (Phase I), what an effective dosage is (Phase II), and only after than testing if it improves upon the current standard of care (Phase III).
Each phase is more costly (both in time and money) than the previous phase and will eliminate a significant portion of drug candidates.
"The success rate of each drug discovery stage in academia was 31.8% for preclinical, 75.1% for phase I, 50.0% for phase II, 58.6% for phase III."
It means giving doctors and nurses simulators, someone to look over their shoulder when learning new techniques, giving them high-quality followup data, finding top performers and make them explain what they do and so on. Which is currently very hard to do, because teaching others means you lose your advantage.
It also means learning from failures of others. That means writing about the fuckups and telling them. Which is currently almost impossible to do, because admitting failure can often result in an end to your career.
And all of this is exacerbated with consolidated, privatized healthcare where the shots are called not by outcome-oriented caregivers, but by profit-oriented MBAs.
There's a clip of John Cleese showing how Beethoven in fact composed the 5th symphony by trial and error.
Google search doesn't find it for me.
> Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.
I think the same applies to developing technology. Certainly resonates with me and the phases I go through.
Failure is an essential part of life and learning.