Like everyone else, at a certain point, several hours in, you begin to wonder if doing your job is insane. And, like everyone else, the first evidence that it's not is that you get paid for it.
When you're a professional artist, however, the thought process doesn't stop there. The fact is, doing enough to simply get paid doesn't take that long. Once you're somewhat established, you can easily get five figures for something that takes you less than ten minutes to make. A contemporary fine artist can draw a face on a bottle cap with a sharpie and make enough to feed a growing child for ten years.
What takes up the vast majority of the time is making the thing good. This process is made strange by the fact that the customers don't notice when it's not good. Ask any full-time painter, sculptor, video artist, whatever--what they subjectively consider their fuck-ups sell as well as anything else. But, nevertheless, you put in hours trying to make it good. Trying to make it, in fact, unlike anything you've seen before.
It's like
you come into work at Taco Bell at
Why do you do that?
Well part of it is you get to eat the taco--that is, you get to see the art when it's finished. Now I will not deny that it's a good and worthy thing to see some good art. But I also know that given several hours of free time in New York, I routinely choose to hang out with my friends and do (roughly) nothing instead of go to see all the amazing art that's housed in various public and private collections all over the city, and even if I was with my friends someplace I'd never been like, say, Java, I'd be just as likely to hang out with my friends and do nothing than go to the temple at Borobodur (which I've always wanted to see and which I'm sure is incredible and beautiful).
In other words, when I'm sitting at my desk trying to make something good and therefore choosing to put effort toward eventually seeing some good art rather than just spending an equal amount of time at Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles or in Tahiti or wherever doing nothing with my friends, there must be some other force at work.
The only other major factor I can think of is, well, you've started this thing, and if you sell it before you think it's good--before it conforms to your own personal standards of what's good--then you know that you are an asshole. You are just one more dickhead cluttering up the universe with lackluster visual information in order to make money. You do that and suddenly you're no better than the people who clutter up the world with lozenge-shaped cars and empire-waist dresses and crocs and bad art and beige things. And you don't want to do that.
Of course you wouldn't be in any danger of doing that if you hadn't decided to make something in the first place.
But if you didn't make something you wouldn't get paid and you wouldn't get to eat.
So, because you want to eat, you make something--which doesn't take very long at all. But, because you want the luxury of self-respect, you have to make it good, unlike anything you've ever seen before, which takes forever.
very true. I hate it when the eraser eats thru the paper more than anything, too.
Very true. Thanks for providing an interesting read, as usual.
It makes me think of my current situation, taking my last foundation class in art school. I have an instructor that forcing us to make "as much work as possible" instead of making anything good - there's too much to do and the quality isn't good, and no one is honing their skills.To her this is an acceptable practice.
Then again, she loves Roy Lichtenstein and all of her art is first done in Photoshop and then projected on large paper and painted in flat color.
"Ask any full-time painter, sculptor, video artist, whatever--what they subjectively consider their fuck-ups sell as well as anything else."
so true