My last post was about my need for success, and how my perceived lack of it stunted my ability to create work.
During my hiatus from creating I experienced parts of the London art scene from the other side of the fence, the perspective of the gallery owners, of the exhibition organisers, and of the art book writers. Whilst this was a hugely rewarding and educational endeavour, it almost ruined art for me. When I look back at that now, that was the wrong way to feel.
I found the ‘scene’ to be a mildly cliquey affair, with the same artists cropping up over and over, and not always due to the skill or integrity of their work. In one case in particular the whole experience seemed to be cleverly engineered by people just looking to make money from an inexperienced artist with fashionable friends. A dealer decided to enthuse over them, his associates and followers would the buy the work, gallery organisers would then invite the artist to sell the work at other shows, and yet more people would arrive at the exhibition and be informed by these associates that this was the best piece of art on the new London art scene. I saw some works made by people whose research material could not have been more than the back of their eyelids. I saw glitter pen covered, cut-out kittens make hundreds of pounds, simply because the artist was easy to manipulate, and the work easy to understand and ergo, to sell.
This was when I should have questioned my idea of ‘success’. I should have questioned it because my idea was that if I had work in a show, and if someone bought that work, that was success. When that didn’t happen for me, no amount of admiring comments made me feel like less of a failure.
I was wrong. Oh, it feels fantastic to show your work, it really does. And what a great ego boost it is when someone pays for it, when someone trades money that they worked for for something that you worked for… but that is not why I went to art school. That is not why I first picked up a pencil and drew, or why I first stitched a crude little doll and gave her a history and a name. It is certainly not why I chewed my nails off during my degree and aimed to make work that would make people cry.
Why have I ever measured artistic success with money? When someone reacts to my work, when they feel something, when they have an experience in their life that they would never have had, had I not sat down and created that object – that – is when I should feel proud. In this time when arts budgets are being cut left right and centre, and less value (monetary or otherwise) is being placed on creative culture by the government, why should any of us judge our own work using the rules with which they live? Should we not be shrugging of those prejudices and agendas and creating because creating is so important, because it is our cultural backbone, because it changes lives and makes us feel in ways money can never make us feel?
I need money to live. But I don’t need money to create. And I will cherish each sale and each show because it helps me to live the life I love, but I will never again feel worthless if those things don’t happen for me.
