More advice for artists before the New Year!

1.      Don’t obey in advance and don’t surrender in advance. Stop worrying about what it takes to please an audience, an art director, a hiring manager. It will drive you to anxiety and to error. Pleasing teachers and instructors for a grade is kid stuff.

Let’s talk about this for a second. Education is import as information can be found through education. But it should be understood that education means to follow a doctrine (or even a dogma). The root “doc” or “duc” as in "docile" and “doctrine” have to do with following or submission to a teaching (dogma) and teachers. It isn’t unbiased free-standing knowledge or information.

Education has, to a greater or lesser degree, begging for approval, whether that is a passing grade or to be the darling of the teacher. It becomes its own society, with customs, hierarchies, crimes, traditions, and dictators. The haunting voices that seem to trouble many artists when entering the workplace or arriving as adults looking to embark as artists are the old teachers and authorities to whom they have previously submitted and whose approval confirms them. They often seek new dominant figures to further their submission. When you think of imposter syndrome, this is a major cause. Without the task of submitting to judgment, students become disoriented and unconfirmed. They doubt their own legitimacy or authenticity of their station and then their work.

Education, in present practice, involves psychological warfare and even bears resemblances to personality cults. I don’t think this is in very much dispute, it is more the degree per institution that is disputed. This doesn’t mean there is nothing to be learned through education. It does mean there are things to reject, unlearn, and reconfigure especially as you exit educational institutions. Personal position, authenticity, standards, and methods of fact verification among the things to discover. This is especially true in the arts.

Entering into the profession of an artist (and the accidental personal and perceptual idiosyncrasies that come with it) involves developing the courage to reject, argue, and confront. Stop asking people to judge your work, instead take control of your work and ask regarding methods, techniques, curious opinion of effects, etc. Leave being a beggar aside. Be respectful but not submissive. At present one of the tasks of artists (old and young) is learning to find, enforce, and guard your dignity and expertise while keeping the upper hand of staying reasonable and keeping a healthy humility.

2.      Critique is not good. It is another psychological warfare tactic. The “judges” or “censors” to whom you submit your work are likely not fellow travelers in your socio/political philosophy. A critic is not an expert in your work, or even necessarily an expert in your field.   Turning over your work for critique is asking for a censor to approve for doctrinal use. Which likely doesn’t have very much to do with why you are making any particular piece. There is no reason to assume someone approving or denying your work will help you learn anything. 

Demonstrating a technique or tactic to you or explaining a method (teaching) is not critique. Critique in practice does not often stick very close to the philosophical doctrines of critical theory, so these theories don’t need to be studied with an eye to understanding the whys and wherefore of this common practice. What should be studied with critique and critics are criminal games and con men. Critique, as practiced in art, is a method to usurp and claim the position and prestige of the artist by an audience member. They do this by using methods of externalizing depression. That is they imitate the depressive impulse of “ruminating”. They will seek out and hunt for any component flaw, a hint of a component flaw, or invent component flaws and dwell on them. I emphasize “component” here to note the whole work is not compromised, it is usually invisible or unimportant fractions of the work. It is a type of passive-aggressive vandalizing while claiming to help assemble.

Don’t ask for critique. Ask for help, maybe, but not critique. An analogy I offer is if you are lost on a road heading to Shangri-La and you meet up with a critic, they will exemplify how many mistakes you made traveling, other routes you could have taken, disapproval of the route you did take, and then suggest you go back and try their preferred route and method. Also, you should probably go to New York City, instead. 

A teacher or temporary guide, by contrast, will let you know you are about 2 miles away, there are a couple of optional routes to take depending on your interests, and a good guide will accompany you as far as they are reasonably able.

Don’t turn over your control, dignity or responsibility as an artist to anyone! Ever! Beware of conmen big and small.

3.      It is important to learn where and how to assert yourselves, test “bullshit”, and confront damaging nonsense. Artists need to invent, not follow standards. What we share in this are standards and they must be very high and effective. We have to be able to craft language and communicate information about what we are doing so others can build from it and expand on it, and confirm it. The “mystical secret language I speak to myself…only for the initiated to understand” nonsense is the tactic of conmen.

4.      If you see a demonstration given by an artist and you think “Ah! I get it!” You don’t get it. It is harder than you are imagining, and your vanity is likely clouding your judgment.