Reasons Why Every Artist Is In A Monumental Identity Crisis
'Am I allowed to call myself an artist? And why does the question keep coming back?'
When I was a girl, I was consumed by a burning desire to become a figure skater. I watched figure skating championships on TV and was transported and mesmerized. I begged my parents to take me skating, but Belgrade only had one skating arena and it was nowhere near to where we lived. We didn’t have a car and my parents were avid followers of the Benign Neglect school of parenting, so I ended up going skating only a handful of times during all my childhood years.
One year I had decided to ask for ice skates as my birthday present. Surely that would be a step towards fulfilling my dream. The rental skates were always a weird and wobbly fit, never properly sharpened, no wonder I was making as much headway as a baby moose on a frozen pond. My parents, in their infinite wisdom, decided that sports store skates were overpriced, and we could go look for skates in so-called ‘Commission Stores’, basically pawn shops. Even nine year old me could clearly see this was a sham - the chance of a random pawn shop having skates at all, and then having them in my size, seemed astronomical.
Yet we traipsed around our neighborhood until it got dark. Obviously we never found the skates. I ended up settling for something else, and eventually giving up on my skating dreams.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I emigrated to Canada. Surely this was my moment!! Skateland! Winter Sportscountry!! The opportunity was not to be missed. Yes I was in my forties, yes I was mildly overweight, yes I had no natural sense of balance, but dammit there was a frozen pond in every park that was maintained during winter for outdoor skating, and dammit I was going to try. I marched myself over to a used sports gear store (because new skates really are pricy, goshdarnit) and got myself an amazing pair of gently worn leisure skates.
Then the pandemic hit and instead of embracing sourdough bread like a normal person, I started obsessively skating. Our local skating rink had a 10 person limit and it was a dream come true - an almost empty ice rink, with a railing to hold on to, right next to my apartment. I started going obsessively. I would skate two to three times per week. I had phone alarms set up to tell me when I needed to secure my spot because they filled up fast. I was looking up technique videos. I was becoming more stable. I was practicing going backwards. I was gaining confidence. I was almost able to do crossovers.
At one point a friend, genuinely confused, asked me ‘why are you so into this?’ I had no idea. My ADHD? Hyper-focus? Childhood dreams? The need to be out of the house and do something while society was standing still? That incredible feeling of fluid ease of movement, similar to swimming, that makes you feel you’ve defeated gravity? The fact that I’m clearly genetically predisposed to the sport, since falling doesn’t even hurt when I land on my generously cushioned ass?
Anyway, since the pandemic died down and skating rinks are overcrowded again I have had some setbacks but I continue to look for skating opportunities every winter. We have forest skating trails that are brilliant, and I love them. I lose ground every summer as I don’t practice and gain some back every winter as I get back into it. I’ve started incorporating balance exercises in the gym hoping they will benefit my skating.
….And you know what’s one thing I have never ever, in all these years of my tempestuous love affair with skating, not even for an instant, ever asked myself?
‘Can I call myself a skater?’ ‘Am I a skater even if I’m not very good at it?’ ‘Can I still say I am a skater even though I will never skate professionally?’
It never even occurred to me.
Yet we ask ourselves these questions as artists all the damn time.
‘Am I really an artist?’ ‘What if I don’t make money from my art?’ ‘What if I have to have a day job to supplement my art income?’ ‘What if I haven’t gone to art school?’ ‘What if I don’t have a large following online?’ ‘What if I never sold an art print?’
Why are we so obsessed with this question? What sort of identity are we seeking in the title of ‘artist’ that we don’t really seek with any of the other things we do?
In most professions, the question of ‘am I really _______’, or ‘can I really call myself _______’ (here insert whatever chosen profession) doesn’t really make sense. You are a member of a certain profession if you work in that field. You can definitely think of borderline scenarios, like ‘what if I work as a doctor but it’s volunteer work so I’m not paid for it?’ I mean, yep, definitely still a doctor. ‘What if I never went to plumbing school but I learned plumbing through an apprenticeship and now I work as a plumber?’ Yep, definitely a plumber. ‘What if I only cook for my family, can I call myself a chef?’ Umm probably not. ‘What if I was trained as a professional chef but I no longer work in the field?’ Hmmmmm… well….. I guess you could go either way on that one. But … do you care? Is anyone asking this?
I have not heard these types of questions from anyone apart from artists.
There seem to be a couple of general ways in which you can determine whether you belong to a profession. Primarily, either you were trained/educated in that profession, meaning you have the requisite skills and/or certification, regardless of whether you work in the field or not, or you actually are working in that profession right now, probably making an income. But the fact is that most jobs just don’t have that magical appeal, that mysterious je-ne-sais-quoi, that alluring draw that makes you want to wear them as a badge of pride. Most professions are not really who you are as a person. They’re something you do.
Art, of course, lives multiple lives.
On one level, we are taught that art is among the highest cultural achievements of our society. We look at the work of famous painters, writers, or composers in a way in which we do not look at the work of top level bankers, or hair stylists, or gym coaches.
On a second level, art is a natural drive within every single person. How many of us never drew pictures as kids? Drawing, singing or dancing, making up stories - in short, trying to express yourself creatively - is developmentally absolutely normal and necessary for every human being.
On a third level, art is a viable education and career path. You can go to the conservatory and train to become a classical musician, you can study sculpture and painting, or writing and literature. There are many professions that rely on the arts, from painters and illustrators to designers, studio musicians, film score composers, special effects crews, video game designers, children’s book authors, and lots of others.
Finally, all these levels can weirdly snake and mingle together in a way that makes it hard for us to determine how exactly we are artists. There are few engineers who have ever said ‘yeah I don’t have any professional engineer training but I just sort of drifted into dabbling with engineering later in life and started making these super-discombobulators powered by dew refraction energy…. But yeah, I just dabble, I don’t know if I can really call myself an engineer.’ Like, some may be out there, it’s a weird old world. But not many.
So it’s not odd that we’re confused. Art is a strange field in that it is both sort of natural to every living person, and also requires a vast amount of effort to really master. It can be formally trained but also has no real rules or limitations. There are general notions of what makes it ‘good’ but the ultimate vision of what ‘good art’ means is different for everyone. It can be professionally lucrative, but objectively is so for only a small number of people.
The weird part is why we feel this moth-to-a-flame draw towards this title of ‘artist’, when we don’t feel the same about other things we do.
I’ve been lifting weights for years but I’m not ‘a lifter’. I’ve studied Japanese language and literature but I’m not a ‘Japanologist’. I mean by education I am, but I would never introduce myself that way. I have worked in interpretation, administration, finance, yet I would never use any of those to define who I am.
So what do we really mean when we ask ourselves ‘Am I an artist?’
…Do we mean ‘Am I any good?’
But that doesn’t really make sense either. If you have ever hired contractors to do any work on your place, chances are when they were finally done you were left somewhere between cursing their magical levels of incompetence and being quietly impressed at just how wrongly even the simplest instructions can be interpreted, when one really tries. Yet at no point did you wonder to yourself ‘were those people really contractors?’ The fact that they sucked didn’t take away their contractor identity. If anything, it reinforced it.
Similarly, anyone who has ever left a hair salon crying has probably not asked themselves ‘was that person really a hairdresser?’ People are generally allowed to suck at their jobs. Why should artists be different.
In fact I’d wager that when you walk into a museum or a gallery, at least 70% of the work hanging there leaves you entirely cold, or maybe scratching your head a little. ‘Hmm, another massive white canvas, fascinating.’ I will never forget one of my visits to the Tate Modern Gallery in London, where they had made a massive crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall (Tate Modern, for those who haven’t been, is housed in an old power station), stretching from end to end. This, apparently, was an art piece by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, financed by none other than Unilever, that illustrious patron of the arts, to the tune of £300,000. The piece was entitled Shibboleth, though later affectionately nicknamed ‘Doris’s Crack.’
If you read the little white plaque on the wall you could be enlightened to what the piece was trying to communicate: “It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space.”
This piece, which of course the artist didn’t have any hand in actually creating - that was done by a team of engineers - along with similar feats of artistic genius along the lines of Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ (which I had been unwittingly emulating for a solid number of years in my early twenties), and another Turner Prize winner I fondly remember, ‘The Lights Going On and Off’, which consists of an empty room in which lights go, as the title suggests, on and off, should give us plenty of peace of mind if we are worrying our work is not ‘good enough’ to be considered ‘real art’.
So what, then? What are we looking for? Why can’t we find it? How many times have you asked yourself this question, how many times have you asked it of others? And since we artists are nice, and like to hype each other up, of course we will always tell each other yes! Yes you are an artist! If you make art, you are an artist! There are no hoops you have to jump through to prove it!
But it never seems to stick. Are we just terminally insecure? Is there a tiny little neurosis that just always comes as part of the artist package, non-refundable?
Here’s my take on it.
I think art is not a solitary activity.
Art is a conversation, an exercise in communication. Even though most of the time when we are making our things we are alone in our little corner scribbling away, there is another participant that needs to come into that process in order for it to be complete - the Audience.
I doubt many have written novels hoping no one would ever read them, or painted pictures hoping they would never be seen. Nervous as we are about showing our little scribbles to the world, we need the world to engage with them emotionally in order for the creation loop to be complete.
So when we ask ‘Am I an artist?’, maybe what we’re really asking is ‘….Hello? …Are you there?’
Because I can’t be an artist on my own. I can’t complete the conversation loop on my own. If I feel like I’m alone here, just talking to myself, a meaningful part of my artistic process is missing. I don’t really make these things for myself.
I make them for You.
What an interesting question. And it's fascinating how hard it feels to own that identity.
Weirdly, because I share my art widely on social media, but only really talk about my publishing work now and then on LinkedIn, many people think of me as an illustrator or designer and not a project manager/editor/typesetter. And I almost always feel the need to correct them. To say 'Well. I've only illustrated a couple of books and a few cards and sold a bunch of patterns. Mostly I wrangle schedules, or throw words and pictures into PowerPoint templates. Mostly I don't earn my living from illustration or pattern design.'
But why? I mean it could be because I am ridiculously picky about Never Ever lying or risking being seen as a liar. But I do also think there is something specific about art that causes us to shy away from owning it as an identity. Maybe it's the very fact that it can be so much different things (an interest, a passion, but also a job, a career). Whereas working in publishing is just working in publishing (while there are a huge number of jobs - including designer and illustrator, of course - within publishing it's still specific and the fact that 80-90% of the invoices I send out are for publishing services and not for illustration is why I can't own it. Even though I would say I spend a similar amount of time, possibly even more on art (most of it not paid directly).
I like the idea that it's a conversation and that we need an audience to validate that identity. I wonder if that's why so many more people are (or seem to be) coming to art and illustration and design these days, because the internet, and especially social media, have given us an audience, and one that will give us an instantaneous reaction?
Ok first of all I love this post! Beautiful writing. Second, I’ve always taken being an artist for granted, never asked myself “am I an artist?” and since childhood adults have recognized this in me and validated this (I am lucky). When I say it aloud to peers or elders who don’t know me, that’s when the trouble starts. People are sometimes visibly offended or amused. They perceive it as arrogant. Many aren’t even aware that “artist” doesn’t refer to only to visual art, but is a way of life. So I don’t think the doubt comes entirely from within. Part of the problem is that there is intentional and contrived gatekeeping in the arts to drive sales. The Art World puts the artist on a pedestal so they can sell work at top dollar, and ensures a perception of scarcity and rarity. But it’s not. Artistic inclinations are part of human nature. People that don’t allow themselves to express those artistic urges can be viciously jealous of those that allow themselves to create freely and will put you down, subtly or not. It’s a tough world out there for artists.