This Thanksgiving holiday week was especially productive. Not that I had any gigs, or practiced a lot, or really have much to show for my efforts. However, a lot of mental space was cleared after I took the time to read the article by photographer Alain Briot (the link to the article is the title of this post). Briot's essay delineates what it means to be an artist, outside of earning income. Some of the fantastic points he makes are summarized here:
1. Feel free to express yourself ... Be free to express more and more of your personality, or character. Art is about freedom and creative expression ... Being an artist is first and foremost about feeling free to create. It is about expressing what is in you, expressing something that potentially others have not expressed before or have expressed in a different way. It is about expressing what you want and maybe even need to express ... If you start your artistic career by listing all the things you cannot do you reduce your creative freedom while you really need to expand it ... Before limiting what you do ask yourself why you are limiting what you can do. Is it because A-you morally object to photographing certain subjects, or is it because B-you feel inexperienced, insecure about your abilities or unsure of the outcome of your efforts? In my estimate reason A is perfectly understandable while reason B needs to be studied carefully. The underlying motivations for reason B need to be exposed and then discarded on the pile of "creative freedom reducing obstacles" that all artists have to contend with.
2. Art is a lifestyle not just an activity. One's art and one's life are eventually inseparable. One cannot be an artist without living a lifestyle which is conducive to being an artist: Being an artist means having a lifestyle that makes creativity and art part of your everyday life ... Fact is, the muses visit whenever they please and not necessarily during "business hours" ... Being an artist therefore means implementing a lifestyle that favors creativity, impulsion and freedom. Because this may conflict with other activities being an artist means learning how to organize your life so that you can handle these potential conflicts successfully.
3. Being an artist does not mean making an income from your art.
4. Being an Artist is sharing your view of the world with a specific audience ... Eventually as artists we are indebted to our audience because we need an audience to communicate with ... But above all, and with all due respect to our audience, artists eventually owe their loyalty to the pursuit of their vision. It is therefore important to remember that, as you pursue your vision, your audience can and may change to reflect your own changes in style, approach, presentation, etc.
5. Being an artist means having an appreciation for the arts.
Thinking of what makes good artists and bad artists, there are no universal answers. This week I watched two documentaries, and thought more about how Briot's words related to the subjects of each one. The first documentary was the accompanying DVD to the new Yo-Yo Ma release
Songs of Joy & Peace, a highly collaborative effort that explores various songs for the Holidays. Throughout this DVD, Ma shows his deference to other great artists from numerous styles of music. Throughout his career, Ma has kept in mind who his audience might be. But with this release, the effort is to draw in further “open-minded” listeners – they may not truly find Ma’s vision as an artist intriguing, but want quality music to play for a Christmas party. This release is one of those shrewd ways that successful musicians who have risen to the top are able to stay there. They know how to sell albums, and this album is going to pull in a
ton of money.
Tangent: The Ma DVD reminds me of the documentary filmed for Herbie Hancock’s Possibilities album, when Hancock collaborated with many musicians from various pop-oriented genres. Ma and Hancock seem to share the same brand of easy-going sociability in making music with other stars. But, they both also fall into the habit of providing responses to interview questions and testimonials that seem more like fore-gone conclusions than real insights. Maybe that’s just my jaded stance on interviews in general, especially with artists who like to sit down to give interviews nearly every day.Going back a step, Ma is a successful “artist in business,” to quote another of Briot’s phrases. But Ma also maintains more revered qualities – namely that being a good artist has more to do with service for mankind than exercising compulsions or ego. Ma satisfies the entire set of Briot’s summarized list.
That brings me to the second documentary I watched...
The Ovation channel had a week-long series on Andy Warhol called
FACTORY PEOPLE. The look into his artistic life, and the mixing of his compulsions with his work got me thinking more about the nuances of being a good artist. Warhol satisfies the following points from Briot, hands down:
1. Feel free to express yourself.
2. Art is a lifestyle, not just an activity.
3. Being an artist does not mean making money from your art.
As some of the interviews from Factory People suggest, Warhol’s views on commercialism, society, and cultural norms helped him carve out his artistic existence. Taking into account that his lifestyle and his art were not just intertwined, they were the same animal, Warhol not only meets the stipulation of the second criterion, but defines it. Lastly, in order to earn money, he started out in advertising, and became financially successful. But, many of his later business dealings, when it came to selling his art, were misguided.
As far as numbers 4 and 5 go, Warhol’s audience was not specific, because pop art was to be considered the complete dismantling of high-brow, middle-brow, or low-brow thought. A quote from the
Wikipedia entry on him adds further proof: “All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Concerning Warhol’s appreciation for art, he might have been less focused on what art he likes, as opposed to what subjects he likes to exploit. Watching what I could of the mini-series, my impression led me think that Warhol enjoyed voyeuristically putting people in front of the camera without any need to have them do anything, although many times the best subjects he found were those who would satisfy their limbic urges. Warhol’s loft space, The Silver Factory, was filled with people that he manipulated into thinking that what they did was somehow vital to humanity, that “tuned out and turned on” was a real achievement. And they lived this “artistic life” as Rome burned. As much as Warhol loved these subjects, he also destroyed a few of them in the same process.
Was Warhol’s art giving to humanity, or just to himself? Was his reason for making art valid, or was his ability to bend the will of each of his subjects the end result?
After thinking more about my artistic life, I still need to mull over the details found in Briot’s essay. No artist is able to cleanly fit into each category that defines “Being an Artist,” but there will always be those that bear those lessons in mind, as well as those that never consider the purpose of art in this world. Looking at Yo-Yo Ma, we see someone who has the goal of doing good for humanity however he can through making music, but as mindful as he is of his own artistic expression, he is equally mindful of his career. With Warhol, we see someone who actually cares more about his artistic vision than money, but that vision is clouded, self-centered, and ultimately destructive.
