who’s a good artist?
Well, what do you think? Are you here to see my opinion on a what makes a good artist? Or are you trying to see if you’re a good artist yourself? Assuming you’re an artist, think about it to yourself. Do you believe you’re a good artist?
If you do, then sure, you’re a good artist. Congratulations and I’m proud of you for advancing at your own curiosity and pace in your artistic pursuit.
If you look to your neighbor and ask yourself if they are a good artist, A) whatever answer you give is wrong, and B) your answer doesn’t matter. The second you look off your paper onto someone else’s test, you’re not doing art for you anymore. You’ve become an industrialist, or someone impacted by industry. You compete whether you want to or not. You look around. You compare, anxiously. There’s an invisible market that runs your life. You’re a crab in a bucket taking pinches from the pincers of another crab that doesn’t even have eyes anymore. You scrutinize yourself and others. In some way, you admit that you fail. If someone is doing better than you, you are automatically failing in comparison. If someone is worse off than you, then you win. You’re both failing and winning in a tiresome race that will never end.
What does it even mean to be an artist? Let alone to be a good or bad one. I think there’s a difference between someone who is technically skilled and works in art and an artist (they can overlap). First there’s the industry artist. If someone works hard to master certain technical crafts and excels in that pursuit, sure, people will call them a good artist. Maybe they’ll even be a great artist, a master, a legend! It’s worth noting that someone born with the talent and rationally decides to be an artist without the emotional connection can be understood as an industrial artist. Their goal is to create well. They learn a set of technical skills and perform it. There’s a right and wrong way to do that kind of artistic work. And even if they do it right there’s someone who can do it right better and faster than them. That’s artist, the industry. Then there’s the soul artist.
They can’t help it. They’re the ones drawing in the sand and making stick forts. They play and they play in the way that you give a child crayons and paper and they make something purely from them, nothing else, and it’s theirs. They pick sometimes random, sometimes representative colors. They give themselves rules and break them. They make decisions that frustrate them and some that excite them. There is no right or wrong, good or bad. There is no one better than them other than the them that doesn’t exist yet, who they are laying the groundwork for. This artist works to get better because their ambition is based in their personal progression in their self-expression. Then, of course, there are a lot of artists who can access both. In their duplicity, there is a constant re-evaluation in their internal balance between soul and industry for that artist.
So, I suppose if you’re a good artist or not also depends on what type of artist you assume yourself to be. Do you work for yourself or others? One isn’t better than the other. An artist doing work for themselves can also work for others or be industry employed, but the place the work comes from and the mindset of the artist are the differentiating factors. They’re not looking at their coworker who is looking at them.
