The French artist Louis Cane once said to me when he was going through a catalogue of my paintings that I should “make a lot of noise”. However, he wasn’t very specific regarding what kind of “noise” I should be making. For me, there are two kinds of noise. There is “cheap noise” and then there is “expensive noise”. “Cheap noise” is of the vulgar shouty variety. Sometimes though it can work and it has worked for several artists, but it is a slippery slope. It reeks of desperation and shameless whoring. And it runs the risk of cheapening good work. The focus ceases to be on the work. “Expensive noise”, on the other hand, is more august. This is a fine and subtle noise where stealth rather than shouting reigns supreme. In this case, you create something so powerful and profound that people naturally gravitate towards it and sometimes in a furious stampede-like way. And the artist hasn’t muttered a word.
The entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel in his book Zero To One states that competition is for losers. I sometimes thought that competition was a corrosive thing and that I was above it. After all, with my art I create my own world and that world is nobody else’s but my own. I am not competing with anyone.
But what is competition and is it a bad thing?
Within the realm of art and the art world, one could objectively and in a plain vanilla black and white way come to the not unreasonable conclusion that it is a highly competitive space. And along those lines I guess one could look at competition in two different ways;
To view competition as a healthy and positive thing. Dare I say, as something inspirational. That it is used as fuel to be not just a better and more driven and committed artist. But also to be a better person; a less self absorbed and narcissistic person who better understands other artists and what they are trying to convey rather than to just be stuck, entangled and rutted in their own world.
To view competition as a threat resulting in chronic envy whenever an artist, especially an artist you may know, becomes very successful while you find that success is always eluding you. You begin to develop negative and destructive thoughts along the lines of believing that you deserve success just as much simply because you believe yourself to be a unique artist and that “mediocre or bad art should not be rewarded”. This mindset is a one way ticket to terminal misery. It is a veritable road to perdition.
I think that being too fixated on the morality/fairness aspect of the art world is deadly; it is like drinking from a cup of slow acting poison. What is “bad/good art” anyway? As I said, getting into the shoes and mind of an artist you do not rate and whose work you think “doesn’t cut it” is far healthier than explicitly condemning them and lamenting “how unfair” and “how full of sh*t” the art world is.
We all have insecurities and having some insecurities can be good. It keeps you on your toes and ignites a fire in the soul. Too much comfort often leads to lethargy and inertia. However, being submerged in insecurities to the point where it is toxic and unhealthy, instilling bad vibes and negative energy, is not a good thing.
The art critic David Sylvester said that, “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.”
Sylvester said this all in 1969. Yet, I think today, in the age of social media, his words are more important then ever. Social media platforms like Instagram can be useful vehicles for making connections and sharing our artwork and processes. However, it can sometimes breed in us a rigid perfectionism; that we must showcase the best of what we have to offer and never be encouraged to fail and take risks. This duality of what is good and bard art is unnecessary and quite destructive. Similarly is being too precious to the point where it kind of functions as a straitjacket and we don’t realise the whole totality of everything that we have to offer.
The right to make “bad art” is almost paradoxically a very emancipating, inspiring and edifying thing. To the point where it renders perfectionism a cul-de-sac.
As an artist I’ve come to the realisation that I now care less regarding whether I and/or my work is “understood”. It is of little to no importance to me since I do not paint or create works with a primary overarching mission to “be understood”. In fact, there is nothing to understand in my paintings. I don’t have any “goal” nor am I trying to make any kind of statement. If I have to say anything in relation to my work it is what I’ve said many times in the past; “I paint my feelings”. Or, more broadly, I paint my inner invisible world. And my paintings are visible artefacts of this invisible world. Thus my paintings are meant to be “felt” more than “understood”.
There are artists I admire, but there is no single artist that really influences me since essentially my core root/source is my inner world. Take the artist Jackson Pollock, for example. His paintings are not meant to be understood and its a fool’s errand to attempt to understand them. For me, his paintings are 100% about feeling. The duality of him as a person and his processes of creating are for me all about energy and feeling. No other artist matches Pollock here. And its a very permanent, primordial and universal thing; transcending the parameters of space and time.
Fame can be a dangerous thing. Some people seek it because in their minds it fills a void. If you are talented and have a lot to offer it presents the opportunity to be valued and respected by many people. Fame has always had it’s drawbacks yet I feel there are two different periods of time that one must be aware of. These are Before The Adoption Of The Internet (BTAOTI) and After The Adoption Of The Internet (ATAOTI). In The last 25 years, the growth and development of the internet has been staggering. We currently live in a world of instant hyper connectivity.
If I had to pick a time to be famous I would pick BTAOTI in a heartbeat. News travelled slower back then. The digital world was less developed. I have no nostalgia or desire to live in the past, but when I look at the growth and development of social media today I flinch at the concept of fame. I would even go as far as saying that eventually it may even lose it’s appeal. It would take real guts to go down that path so much so that anonymity would become increasingly attractive. Andy Warhol said that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. The internet has provided a platform for everybody to publicly project themselves if they want to. There is so much content on the internet today. There is no way one would be able to absorb all the digital content out there in one lifetime. According to Statista, as of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video content was uploaded to YouTube alone every minute.
It is increasingly a rarity nowadays to not have any personal platform or content online. To be purely anonymous will be rarer and more cherished than fame itself.
A few years ago I wrote a post entitled ‘Talent Is Cheaper Than Table Salt’. In this post I outline how talent is actually not so rare and rather it is hard work that matters when it comes to finding success.
I’ve often thought about this post, especially as it is one of my most viewed posts. Yet since I first wrote it, I’ve increasingly began to question it, even though, at least at a logical and basic level, it may be correct. But what if, just what if, I may have got it completely wrong regarding talent? Maybe genuine talent is actually rather scarce. To be clear, when I say this, I mean a kind of talent that is just so special and very hard to replicate.
The quote in my original article by the writer Stephen King goes like this; “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
King is correct, especially if one also takes into account the second sentence of his quote. It is all true. Yet talent and hard work are two different things. Anyone can develop a hard work ethic, but not everyone has real god given supernatural talent. I think we need to really reassess how we define talent. I also dispute this notion that if you work hard you will automatically be rewarded. We fall victim to something called ‘Survivorship Bias’ – only looking at success stories and overlooking all the failures.
There are countless stories of those who worked extremely hard and didn’t ‘make it’. Yet those stories seem to be lost on us. But that doesn’t mean that one should not work hard. Absolutely not. Hard work, unexpected challenges and multiple failures are an important part of one’s character building. Saying that hard work is a waste of time sets a bad example.
As a whole, we often neglect to take into account just how random the world can be. Please see my other post Fooled By Randomness. Life is not as linear as we think it is. There are some things that are simply beyond our control.
But getting back to the subject of talent. When I look at the people I admire throughout history one thing they all have in common was that they were special. They were not like everybody else. They had talent in spades and often there was hardly any chasm between their life and their art. Now THAT is rare.
Often when looking at a work of art, the first question to pop into the viewer’s head isn’t, ‘What’s it called?’ or ‘What’s it about?’. Rather it is, ‘Who’s it by?’. The more discerning viewer may ask the first two questions, but most will ask the third. Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are some of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art. It is hard to find someone who has never heard of Picasso before. Yet how many could name the title of one of his many paintings?
Picasso is a brand in the same way that fashion giants Prada, Armani, Chanel and Louis Vuitton are brands. When one looks at a suit, most will invariably try to find out what brand or label it is over any investigations regarding it’s intrinsic qualities. It’s the same with other ubiquitous consumer products like Coca Cola. You can buy a cheaper supermarket cola, which may even contain the exact same ingredients, yet it will never have the same cachet as a ‘Coke’.
The following story encapsulates perfectly the power of ‘Who’s it By’. The artist Bansky recently tested this by submitting an original work of art for the 2018 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London under the fictitious name ‘Bryan S Gakmann’ (an anagram of ‘Banksy anagram’). It got rejected during the selection process. Nobody had heard of this Bryan S Gakmann chap. Yet when Banksy himself was asked to feature a work at the show by the organizers, he submitted the work rejected under his fake alias. After all, it was a ‘Banksy’ in the end.
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
These are the words of the writer Stephen King. When I first read this quote several years ago, a part of me was outraged. My thoughts at the time were something along the lines of, ‘Talent is cheaper than table salt!?! Who does this man think he is!?! Talent is an asset goddammit!
After cooling down I re-read that quote in its entirety, beyond the first sentence…. ‘What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.’ After pondering over the last sentence of King’s quote I slowly developed one hell of a reality check. The quote demythologises the notion of how talent by itself is enough to succeed. For many years I thought talent was all that one needed. All my heroes were outrageously talented and unique human beings. Besides I couldn’t care less for lesser mediocre beings regardless of how hard they worked. I despised mediocrity.
Some complain that we live in a society where mediocrity is rewarded. And maybe they are right to complain? After all some of the biggest names in the world today are quite ordinary people and one could even come to the conclusion that they have very limited talents with nothing enlightening to say. That may be. But they are successful, because they work incredibly hard and know what makes the average individual on the street tick. They work tirelessly whilst also mirroring Joe and Joanna Blogs, giving them what they want.
UPDATE: On 21st June 2021, I wrote a follow-up article, ‘Real Talent Is Rare And Not So Cheap’, where I challenge some of the points made in this article.
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