To continue as artists, we have to keep making a choice to be out there on a lonely limb. Because artists, by definition I think, break new ground. Artists explore ideas and techniques that haven’t been done before. To be artists we have to create tension and push cultural boundaries further. It’s what we do and it’s our job.
The hard part about pushing boundaries is that it requires some level of independence and that cultural distance can be isolating. We cannot do our job pushing the boundaries of ideas and culture if we’re beholden to them. And so we have to set ourselves apart from orthodoxies or operate in the spaces between worlds. For me, this manifests in a feeling of, “I feel like I can exist almost everywhere, but I don’t belong anywhere.”
And so the choice. We can be artists that create tension and push the edges of things or we can be craftspeople that masterfully create something that’s already accepted - not both.
To be clear, I don’t apply this definition only to who we conventionally think of as “artists.” Sure, photographers, painters, actors, dancers, musicians, and sculptors are all artists. But so are the chefs, computer programmers, corporate strategists, public servants, doctors, parents, physicists, and teachers that push up against the conventional wisdom of their domains to explore new ground.
In addition to being lonely, choosing to be an artists has frustrating trade-offs. The idea of a “starving artist” captures it well.
It’s hard to be paid handsomely for your work when you’re pushing boundaries, because the world doesn’t know it wants to pay for this weird, uncomfortable thing we’re exploring. If we’re lucky, maybe the world will develop a palate for what we’re doing while we’re alive, or even we’ve gone ahead. But maybe it never will.
I have felt this tension in my own vocation. I don’t really fit in anywhere in a corporate setting, even though I’ve always worked in them. I don’t have a career aspiration that’s as simple as, “I want to be a CFO” or “I want to run my own company.” A lot of the time, I don’t think my colleagues have any idea what to do with someone like me, because my skill set and aspirations are bizarre and hard to fit into existing functions.
I suspect that if I told people at work, “the aim of my work is to bring goodness to the world by creating high-performing governments and help organizations to stop wasting talent.” They’d be like, “what the hell are you talking about?”
But that’s the choice, isn’t it? We could probably be wealthier than we are, or have more status than we do now by just creating what we know people already like.
But that wouldn’t be art.
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