All art is subjective. As an aspiring artist, you’ll hear that over and over as the ultimate justification for being duly rejected hundreds of times by the gatekeepers of the art world’s well-guarded pantheon. It doesn’t matter on which figurative continent you reside. Literature, sculpting, painting, music, you name it.
And that’s ignoring the “artistic field” or “creator world” of social media, of course. Because that isn’t art. Frankly, I don’t know what it is.
Along the professional path from creating things as a “nobody” to being a successful “somebody”, there are individuals stationed at certain points—agents, editors, executives, financers, producers—whose head-nods either allow you to pass, or force you to wait around, gather dust and founder, until another takes over their shift and tells you to brush yourself off so they can newly decide your fate. Or just forces you to take another route, altogether.
And all they have on their minds is money. “Will your advancing benefit the royal house, and, thereby, me?” Pretend it’s the Warring States period in ancient China, when everything was a little more cutthroat and everyone hated outsiders, something like that. “If I let you through, will your passing help the authorities I work for to prosper?”
This is the nature of business. “If I hire you, will you increase the prosperity of the business at which I am employed—for my managers and executives—and, thus, help me maintain my employ and be given pay-raises and promotions in the future?” There’s nothing wrong with it, per se. However, when you add art into the mix, it gets a little weird. Because all art is subjective.
Nobody knows what’s going to sell. So, they stick to what they do know: what’s sold in the past. And the formula for that is already established. Follow that, train by that, and you should be okay. Don’t, and you have to haggle with a narrowly-focused, simple-minded bureaucracy, against which you’re almost always going to lose.
My office has received your inquiry, re: [your name]’s desire to make cookies. First off, how does your cookie cutter look? Like it’s supposed to? Like they taught you in cookie cutter college? Almost exactly like all the other cookie cutters that have been designed, that stamped out cookies people actually purchased in the past? Does it look like so-and-so’s? Like the one she made from what she saw other cookie cutters making when she was learning about cutting cookies? Like Yermfalafeldough, the best-selling cutter of cookies from Gooeygooeycookiebagsofmoney, Transnistria? Let’s see. Yeah, no. Just no. Sorry. This doesn’t make any sense. As a cookie.
Did you taste it?
I don’t need to, I can tell nobody will want them because of how your cutter looks. The edges are too round, the shape isn’t really identifiable. Is that a Christmas tree? A gingerbread man? A hippo…campus? Uzbekistan? Stromboli? The island, not the food? Or maybe the food? I mean, what is that? People want to know the shape of the cookie they’re eating. That it resembles a cookie they’ve eaten before, and enjoyed.
But you didn’t try the cookies? Or read my ingredients?
I already told you I don’t have to. Pass. All art is subjective.
In some fields—popular music, painting or visual art, say—you’ve got an image to help you get by. And, once on the road, the state apparatus will help guide you on your passage, because it’s noted you likely won’t survive with just your (possibly meager) talent. But as long as you look like you do, and people find it pleasurable, and you maintain that appearance, no harm should come to you, and your journey should be prosperous for all (mostly the royal house). But over time, you’re going to get tired, fugly or haggard. So they’ll send you fine silks, a pleasant-voiced translator and lots of lead-based makeup to keep you presentable. Why?
Because they’ve subjectively allowed you to pass in the first place. You’re an investment. You filled the slot that another could have, who may or may not have been more profitable than you. Now you’re expected to make them money, until it’s obvious you can’t anymore.
Of course, as a novice traveler, if you present documentation of your trek so far to the gatekeeper, and have a track record of having survived similar journeys, you’re more likely to pass. (This is where social media enters into the conversation, or work experience, or, God forbid, an art degree.) The gatekeepers don’t have to let everyone through, remember. They’ll still be paid, regardless. Because the candidates don’t and will not stop; the quotas of passers will always, always, be filled. Which is why gatekeepers can be so mechanically and artlessly selective, and justify their money-based kingmaking and trash-dumping with the righteous pronouncement of subjectivity.
People are desperate to pass. That’s why so many not only capitulate to the demands of ‘Make cookies like everyone else’, but internalize it from a very young age, and start out learning ‘like everyone else’ from day one, knowing it will increase their likelihood of reaching that pantheon one day.
The journey itself be damned.
All art is subjective. Profit, however, will never be.
