Art & Fear ← We Can Solve This

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.

a mutual friend whose single-minded quest, for twenty years, was to land a one-man show at his city’s major art museum. He finally got it. And never produced a serious piece of art again. There’s a painful irony to stories like that, to discovering how frequently and easily success transmutes into depression.

Avoiding this fate has something to do with not letting your current goal become your only goal.

OPERATING MANUAL FOR NOT QUITTING a. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently. b. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work. (Look at it this way: If all goes well, MOMA will eventually come to you.)

David Bayles, to be exact — who began piano studies with a Master. After a few months’ practice, David lamented to his teacher, “But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers.” To which the Master replied, “What makes you think that ever changes?”

Imagination is in control when you begin making an object. The artwork’s potential is never higher than in that magic moment when the first brushstroke is applied, the first chord struck. But as the piece grows, technique and craft take over, and imagination becomes a less useful tool.

“What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”

the piece you make is always one step removed from what you imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you’re right on the edge of being able to imagine.

he devoted only about one percent of his energy to conceiving a design — and the remaining ninety-nine percent to holding onto it as a project ran its course.

your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute — but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.

A finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution. And perhaps surprisingly, the more common obstacle to achieving that correspondence is not undisciplined execution, but undisciplined imagination.

“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”

most artists don’t daydream about making great art — they daydream about having made great art.

The artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

Materials are like elementary particles: charged, but indifferent. They do not listen in on your fantasies, do not get up and move in response to your idle wishes. The blunt truth is, they do precisely what your hands make them do. The paint lays exactly where you put it; the words you wrote — not the ones you needed to write or thought about writing — are the only ones that appear on the paper.

The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.

Lincoln doubted his capacity to express what needed to be said at Gettysburg, yet pushed ahead anyway, knowing he was doing the best he could to present the ideas he needed to share.

What’s really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.

The fear that you’re only pretending to do art is the (readily predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials. After all, you know better than anyone else the accidental nature of much that appears in your art, not to mention all those elements you know originated with others

It’s easy to imagine that real artists know what they’re doing, and that they — unlike you — are entitled to feel good about themselves and their art. Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work.

The increasing prevalence of reflexive art — art that looks inward, taking itself as its subject — may to some degree simply illustrate attempts by artists to turn this obstacle to their advantage. Art-that’s-about-art has in turn spawned a whole school of art criticism built around the demonstrably true (but limited) premise that artists continually “re-define” art through their work. This approach treats “what art is” as a legitimate, serious and even thorny topic, but expends little energy on the question of “what art making is”.

if there were some ongoing redefinition of “what chess is”, you’d probably feel a little uneasy trying to play chess.

while you may feel you’re just pretending that you’re an artist, there’s no way to pretend you’re making art.

Your work may not be what curators want to exhibit or publishers want to publish, but those are different issues entirely.

You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn’t very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren’t good, the parts that aren’t yours. It’s called feedback, and it’s the most direct route to learning about your own vision.

Examples of genius only accentuate that truth. Newspapers love to print stories about five-year-old musical prodigies giving solo recitals, but you rarely read about one going on to become a Mozart.

If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble. Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. Inevitably, your work (like, uh, the preceding syllogism...) will be flawed.

Annihilation is an existential fear: the common — but sharply overdrawn — fear that some part of you dies when you stop making art. And it’s true. Non-artists may not understand that, but artists themselves (especially those who are stuck) understand it all too well. The depth of your need to make things establishes the level of risk in not making them.

The place to learn about your execution is in your execution.

Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work.

Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, your habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace. The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly — without judgement, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes.

With commercial art this issue is often less troublesome since approval from the client is primary, and other rewards appropriately secondary. But for most art there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?

In following the path of your heart, the chances are that your work will not be understandable to others. At least not immediately, and not to a wide audience.

When the author fed his computer the question, “What works?”, a curious pattern emerged: a consistent delay of about five years between the making of any given negative, and the time when prints from that negative began selling.

No wonder artists so often harbor a depressing sense that their work is going downhill: at any give moment the older work is always more attractive, always better understood.

Ben Shahn rather wryly commented, “It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.”

What is sometimes needed is simply an insulating period, a gap of pure time between the making of your art, and the time when you share it with outsiders.

Such respites also, perhaps, allow the finished work time to find its rightful place in the artist’s heart and mind — in short, a chance to be understood better by the maker. Then when the time comes for others to judge the work, their reaction (whatever it may be) is less threatening.

Conversely, catering to fears of being misunderstood leaves you dependent upon your audience. In the simplest yet most deadly scenario, ideas are diluted to what you imagine your audience can imagine, leading to work that is condescending, arrogant, or both. Worse yet, you discard your own highest vision in the process.

For the artist, the issue of acceptance begins as one simple, haunting question: When your work is counted, will it be counted as art?

Beaumont Newhall wrote the first substantive account of the history of photography (titled, logically enough, The History of Photography),

the photographers hurt by Newhall’s book were not those he damned, but those he left out entirely. In the public’s mind, the former at least became part of “the history of photography”, while the latter ceased to exist entirely!

Jaded sophisticates laugh at this belief, but usually buy into it along with everyone else anyway.

at any given moment, the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands — namely, art that’s already been around for a generation or a century. Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.

On both intellectual and technical grounds, it’s wise to remain on good terms with your artistic heritage, lest you devote several incarnations to re-inventing the wheel. But once having allowed for that, the far greater danger is not that the artist will fail to learn anything from the past, but will fail to teach anything new to the future.

that vision has so pervasively become ours that people photographing vacation scenery today often do so with the hope that if everything turns out just right, the result will not simply look like a landscape, it will look like an Ansel Adams photograph of the landscape.

This too will pass, of course. In fact, artistically speaking, it has passed. The unfolding over time of a great idea is like the growth of a fractal crystal, allowing details and refinements to multiply endlessly — but only in ever-decreasing scale.

Separated two or three generations from the forces that spawned the vision they championed, they were left making images of experiences they never quite had.

we modestly offer this bit of cowboy wisdom: When your horse dies, get off.

The difference between acceptance and approval is subtle, but distinct. Acceptance means having your work counted as the real thing; approval means having people like

The difference between acceptance and approval is subtle, but distinct. Acceptance means having your work counted as the real thing; approval means having people like it.

In a healthy environment, good work would get recognition; if your only validation is internal, society has failed. Sounds straightforward enough, but society is hardly a monolith — it harbors many environments, some repressive to the artist, others supportive.

for many others the constant wear and tear takes a toll. For those artists, survival means finding an environment where art is valued and artmaking encouraged.

the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the one issue that really counts — namely, whether or not you’re making progress in your work. They’re in a good position to comment on how they’re moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.

Most artists keep a well-rehearsed speech close at hand for fielding the familiar request to explain a finished piece. But if asked to describe how it felt during the artmaking — well, that often comes out a bit like Dorothy trying to describe the Land of Oz to Auntie Em. Between the initial idea and the finished piece lies a gulf we can see across, but never fully chart.

in most matters of art it is more nourishing to be a maker than a viewer.

Your reach as a viewer is vastly greater than your reach as a maker. The art you can experience may have originated a thousand miles away or a thousand years ago, but the art you can make is irrevocably bound to the times and places of your life.

The surprising (and probably disturbing) corollary to this is that we don’t learn much about making art from being moved by it.

it took a decade to dispel the gnawing feeling that my work should do what that work had done. And more years still before I thought to question where the power of such art resided: In the maker? In the artwork? In the viewer?

If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment.

Try, if you can, to reoccupy your own aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work.

Apart from the readership of Artforum, remarkably few people lose sleep trying to incorporate gender-neutral biomorphic deconstructivism into their personal lives. As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, “Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art.”

There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman.

One of the best kept secrets of artmaking is that new ideas come into play far less frequently than practical ideas — ideas that can be re-used for a thousand variations, supplying the framework for a whole body of work rather than a single piece.

We’d all love to squirm out of this one, but the undeniable fact is that your art is not some residue left when you subtract all the things you haven’t done — it is the full payoff for all the things you have done. One might as well wish for indulgence to go back and pick better numbers for last week’s lottery.

when you watch your work unfold day by day, piece by piece, there’s no escaping cause and effect. Simply put, what you did got you here, and if you apply the same methods again you will likely get the same result again. This is true not just for being stuck, but for all other artistic states as well - including highly productive states. As a practical matter, ideas and methods that work usually continue to work. If you were working smoothly and now you are stuck, chances are you unnecessarily altered some approach that was already working perfectly well.

When things go haywire, your best opening strategy might be to return — very carefully and consciously — to the habits and practices in play the last time you felt good about the work. Return to the space you drifted away from and (sometimes at least) the work will return as well.

The dilemma every artist confronts, again and again, is when to stick with familiar tools and materials, and when to reach out and embrace those that offer new possibilities. And on average, the younger artist tends to experiment with a large and varied range of tools and materials, while the veteran artist tends to employ a small and specific set.

In time, as an artist’s gestures become more assured, the chosen tools become almost an extension of the artist’s own spirit. In time, exploration gives way to expression.

The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons.

It’s easy to imagine today’s art instructor cautioning Chopin that the Mazurka thing is getting a little repetitive, that the work is not progressing. Well, true, it may not have been progressing — but that’s not the issue. Writing Mazurkas may have been useful only to Chopin — as a vehicle for getting back into the work, and as a place to begin making the next piece. For most art <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>