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Artists must be allowed to make bad work

austinkleon.com

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Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#131

Post by iamsomewalrus »

ilamont wrote: post #119

You really see this in the music world. Nobody comes fully formed ... you're playing covers or recording practically unlistenable demos and experiments, "getting your chops" and getting feedback from your piano teacher or whoever happens to be in the club that night. It's excruciating. But over time, you get better. Practice pays off. Playing with other people of varying skill levels pays off. You stop doing covers a…

Oh man, thousands of up votes for a Led Zeppelin reference. This mirrors my experience as a musician. Learning to play gave me the confidence to go into different scenarios and recognize that I had to tolerate being bad first and then I would get it. It's a journey. It's a sacrifice. Strangely, it never felt like a sacrifice at the time.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#132

Post by mtalantikite »

dimgl wrote: post #126
epiccoleman wrote: post #84

I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential,…

I love this, thanks for sharing. When I was younger I used to make a lot of music. A majority of it sucked, but some of it was legitimately good. So much so that some of my friends would go out of their way to listen to it even if they had other options. Funnily enough they'd still listen even if the tracks were always super low quality (I was young and didn't know how to mix it and I didn't have any kind of equipmen…

I have a similar story, as I'm sure many people with musical or other artistic talents, but who don't come from families that have artists in them do. I finally decided to get back to studying music with a private teacher after nearly 20 years away from it and it's great. Try out some teachers near you and just commit to spending 30-60 minutes a day practicing. You'll spend a bunch of time in that in between phase the quote from Ira Glass mentions, but it's worth it to do that for yourself if you can!

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#133

Post by epiccoleman »

mtalantikite wrote: post #132
dimgl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this, thanks for sharing. When I was younger I used to make a lot of music. A majority of it sucked, but some of it was legitimately good. So much so that some of my friends would go out of their way to listen to it even if they had other options. Funnily enough they'd still listen even if the tracks were always super low quality (I was young and didn't know how to mix it and I didn't have any kind of equipmen…

I have a similar story, as I'm sure many people with musical or other artistic talents, but who don't come from families that have artists in them do. I finally decided to get back to studying music with a private teacher after nearly 20 years away from it and it's great. Try out some teachers near you and just commit to spending 30-60 minutes a day practicing. You'll spend a bunch of time in that in between phase th…

It's impossible to overstate how amazingly effective having a teacher can be. I recently started taking guitar lessons again after over a decade of noodling (I took lessons in high school, and kept playing, but never sought instruction after leaving home for college).

It is crazy how quickly I've improved in the last few months. Some of it is mechanical stuff, some of it is knowledge stuff, but I think the biggest thing is just knowing that every two weeks I'm going to chat with my teacher, which keeps me motivated to keep working on things and also just gives me a reason to play.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#134

Post by [deleted] »

epiccoleman wrote: post #84

I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential,…

[deleted]

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#135

Post by coldtea »

Between the collapse of the music industry, GPT/Midjourney, big tech penny pinching ad-sponsored artists, copyright strikes for BS reasons, smaller attention spans, and a long recession (affecting disposable income), artists probably wont be allowed to make any work at all...

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#136

Post by karaterobot »

It's worth asking who counts as an artist for the purpose of this argument. Is an artist someone primarily concerned with creating art for art's sake, and their value is in expanding the public consciousness and deepening the discourse? Or, are they an entertainer, primarily concerned with popularity and commercial success? Are these different roles judged by the same standards?

For instance, we could very well say that, if you are primarily making art as a product, you are like a vendor in a marketplace. And, as a vendor in a marketplace, we consumers don't need to nurture you, or be patient with your failures. If you make a bad batch, we just move on to the next vendor selling a similar product.

The definitions of art and artists have changed a lot since 1969. We used to have this concept of selling out, and if you engaged in it, you weren't a serious artist to a lot of people. We don't really have that concept today, at least not in the same way. You also might not have been considered a serious artist if you worked in a popular medium: popular music, television, comic books, etc., all of which I think most people consider valid art forms today.

I'm not saying this was the right way to think about art. I'm saying that's how it was. And while I don't know a lot about David Sylvester, I see that he was a fine art critic and curator, so I am assuming he might have been talking about a particular kind of artist when he said this.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#137

Post by stale2002 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #62
watwut wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Challenging the premise of the article based on reading only title while not really understanding the language the title is written on is not actually something praise worthy. If he is a.) not reading article and b.) not understanding normal and common English idiom, then pointing out he should stay away from the discussion is valid. And that is assuming it is genuine misunderstanding and not, like, typical nerdy "I…

I criticize the title because it says something vague piggybacking on the idea of freedom to guilt-trip its readers to support a controversial opinion that has barely anything to do with the title in question. And I can only learn the content by clicking on that clickbait title that provides no information. Well, if it is common in English to refer to the situation when the public opinion about you is allegedly shape…

> it says something vague piggybacking on the idea of freedom

This is where you are wrong.

It is not based on the idea of freedom. The point of the article, and the title, has nothing to do with whether someone is legally allowed to make bad art, or has some fundamental human rights, that are being infringed on, related to freedom.

Instead, the purpose of the article, and the title, is that because artists are more in the public eye these days, this extra scrutiny on every single piece of work that they do, has anti-creative effects on artists, and this is bad.

The only person who invented a fictional narrative about freedom, was you. The actual point of the title, and the article, was actually pretty obvious though, if you aren't looking for some gotcha.

> that I couldn't expect.

It was actually very easy to understand the article, if you start from the idea of "This article author isn't completely stupid, let me think for a second as to what such a person might be attempting to say, assuming they do not believe the obviously untrue statement that making bad art is illegal".

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#138

Post by badpun »

js8 wrote: post #10

That's the free market pressure. The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. And it is by many believed to be a good thing, because it's very meritocratic. But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocrat…

> But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market

People are competing against other humans, who need rest too. Hence, everybody rests, and things work out for everybody in the free market scenario.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#139

Post by badpun »

dagw wrote: post #29
lucozade wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.

People aren't judging (or pricing) random Da Vinci sketches as art, but as investments and historic artefacts. In fact I'd go as far as saying that anybody paying more than ~$300k-$500k for a piece of 'art' isn't paying for the art any more, but are investing in a financial asset (that may or may not look nice displayed in their living room)

I'd say the treshold is much lower, and depends on the area and wealth of the person. But I doubt even a billionaire would pay $200k for a piece of an unknown artists just because he loves it. Maybe he'd pay $50k. For regular people, it's more like $5k.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#140

Post by badpun »

NickC25 wrote: post #110

Of course they should. There are countless fantastic musicians, for example, who have albums that have both great tracks and filler tracks on them. Just because someone has demonstrated greatness (even consistently) doesn't mean that every track that comes out of their studio is destined to top the charts or win some sort of award. Even the best athletes have "bad days at the office" (just yesterday, the #1 tennis pl…

The difference is, artists can just shelve all the crap they made and release only the good stuff.
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