Chapter 4
Fears About Others
- Other people's reaction to your art doesn't need to cause problems for you but they do anyways.
- We often confuse priorities of others and priorities of our own.
- As a society, we are expecting artists to produce a personally imtimate and also generally alluring artwork.
- When things go well we keep it to ourselves, but when it isn't we seek for external validation.
- It is hard to not take criticism of your work when art is very much personal.
Understanding
- Wanting to be understood is a basic need.
- By presenting your art to the world, you are handing out the power of disapproval to others.
- That may be true. Artists aren't generally someone who are viewed as a model of normalcy.
- What may be needed is some time for an artwork to achieve a state of understanding by the artist themselves. With that in place, external understanding or the lack thereof will be less of a problem to the artist.
- Catering to the fear of misunderstanding and not following what you truly believe will limit your artwork to be something that can easily be understood by the audience.
- By doing this you risk being arrogant and condescending.
Acceptance
- Will my work be counted as art?
- This leads to fear of your work percieved as craft, hobby, or decoration. (not art).
- Even worse, nothing at all.
- At some point this fear will collide with doing work that is true to you.
- The world generally does reward authentic work, but the problem is that there is a temporal aspect to it; you may not be around to get the reward when it happens.
- The world will generally try to understand work that already has been understood for a long time.
- Risk not being understood by exploring new territories?
- or take the proven path to be immediately understood?
- This may be necessary, beneficial, and inevitable.
- Everyone does have some period of recapitualtion.
- The danger here is that you may be stuck there forever and not teach the future you anything new.
- A better question is will your work be counted as your art?
Approval
- Acceptance and approval becomes linked and indistinguishable, but they are subtly different.
- Acceptance: will it be counted as art?
- Approval: will people like it?
- For artists, surviving means finding an environment where art is valued and encouraged.
- These are audience related issues.
- Audience comes later.
- The only pure communication is between you and your work.
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