How do you know when you have made it? Is it when you have accumulated a great deal of wealth, or when you manage to get that management job you were after? Perhaps its when you get a thousand followers on Instagram, or maybe the number is higher than that...a million? Is it when you have become a household name, locally, nationally or globally? Making it means different things to different people, but if we are operating according to the neoliberal ideology that is western society "making it" is all of those things.
As an artist, "making it" according to that criteria is pretty difficult. Most of us who work in the arts make a poultry $5K per year from our arts practice. Clearly not enough to live on, much less anything else. Even in the art world, "making it" means accruing wealth, selling truckloads of paintings or other work and featuring in some interior design magazine or other. I have been watching a British TV show called Making it At Market. In this show, British arts and crafts people work with a mentor to develop their arts practice as a business. It involves the artist figuring out ways to reduce the time it makes to create a "signature" piece, and developing a methodology to make their favourite piece in the most efficient manner. That's all very well, but doing so means that experimentation, playing around and doing something for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of the process are no longer part of the art-making equation.
It is similar to artists who are represented by galleries. Often they report having to limit their oeuvre to what they first became well known for...what "sells" according to the gallery. The nature of making art is almost diametrically opposed to that, in my opinion. For me, the playing around, experimentation, literally getting your hands dirty and the materiality is what makes art so interesting to me. Lingering over the way the paint interacts with salt or fussing around with details is part of the joy. Taking your time over an art work is much like savouring every mouthful of a delicious meal.
So where does that leave someone like me? Well I have also been watching another (British) show (recuperating from surgery allows for quite a lot of TV time). On that show, artists take things that were destined for landfill, literally saved from the tip and turn them into something whimsical, beautiful and arguably quite valuable. These pieces are one of a kind, often rescued from the last iteration of its existence. I find this show so inspiring! I remember the work that I had in the Salvage exhibition a few years ago, which kind of did the same thing. Not very useful, I suppose, but kind of doing the same thing.
So, much like my TV counterparts, I will try to find a way to do both - run my arts practice as a business AND keep exploring, experimenting, and making the kind of art that makes me happy. Some people will hate what I do, others will love it. Which is why we need all kinds of art and artists, not just those who are "on trend" or can earn truckloads of money. For me, "making it" is having the luxury of being able to continue to make things. As environmentalist, (environmentalists are also fundamentally less concerned with "making it" quantitatively and more with "making it" from a sustainable and livable viewpoint) David Orr says:
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
I do hope that you can "make it" by being such a person; one of moral courage, fighting to make the world habitable and humane.
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