Seek perspective before you seek consensus, permission, or approval, but don’t completely disregard input from your fans and supporters.
Why I seek perspective first
Seek perspective to pursue meaning
You need perspective before input because without it, you cannot decide decide how to use the input. You run the risk of attending only to the most recent reaction you received and pursuing the next one.
But you need a longer-term perspective oriented toward a more meaningful goal.
Pursue meaning because life isn’t fair
Everyone is different. Not everyone is going to like what you do. You’re also likely getting at least some of this feedback online, where people let the worst dimensions of their nature run amok among the comments.
Unfairness in undue criticism (especially online!)
This makes it likely that you will encounter an unfair proportion of negative stimuli. That there is a silent group of people that don’t mind what you do, and who even like it.
Living things avoid negative stimuli. If you are alive, you probably don’t like negative reactions to what you do. In fact, we dislike that so much that we tend to overemphasize it. Somehow pain-avoidance remains more salient than opportunities.
So, when you put your work out there, you increase the risk of becoming a procrastinator. Sometimes the accountability, structure, and schedule of producing helps to balance this, but not always.
Growing out of reactivity
At least by adolescence we can imagine different social scenarios in some detail. When we can do this, we gain access to the inner senate of our hypothetical peers. It’s like we gain the processing power to walk and talk while simulating other people.
We can poll these virtual peers about our actions. The irony of this phase is that, in trying to save yourself from actual embarrassment that worst of adolescent fears, we have moved the source of embarrassment inside ourselves.
I’m going to call that shame. And in early adolescence this is such an overpowering new phenomenon that it seems to be the only thing that matters. It sometimes seems to shout down our own inner voice — almost supplanting our consciences.
In rebelling, we generated a chorus of critical little authorities that we believe often unthinkingly and obey often compulsively. We usually heed them unthinkingly because we’re using up all our processing power to virtualize them and because, as research is starting to show, adolescence is not characterized by very much critical thinking.
A little more about the adolescent imaginary audience here
Seek perspective to grow as a creator
Of course you grow out of this… well, sort of. Grad school seems to bring it out in people again sometimes. Anything that ups the cost of social mistakes will bring out cliques and alliances and amplify that adolescent-style social anxiety. (Cf., reality TV shows.)
Seek perspective to engage your communities constructively
The deal online is that you find your community. Seth Godin has famously called these, “Tribes.” (I don’t love the term, but I do like the idea that you find) the people who like what you do.
Without perspective, you can run the risk of having negative feedback or the fear of it, overpower your community-selection process. It will lead you to avoid them altogether or to choose only the safest-looking ones. But there are problems with this:
- Appearances can be deceptive, and the community that looks safe can turn out not to be. The community that seems to critical can turn out to help you greatly.
- Even a safe community can be either mediocre or too small of a pond for your talent, and so stunt your development and waste your time.
- Constructive criticism can help you grow!
- Communities can get change. If you are just there being reactive, you cannot be a leader in that community and keep it constructive.
If you have purpose and some higher-level perspective, you can choose to engage in ways that help you grow. If you don’t have them, you cannot even tell if you are growing.
From adolescent peer-fears to a more actualized and purposeful engagement with peers, this whole process is part of being and becoming. All of it gets subverted easily and often enough, but the end is good: an integrated (creative) self.
When that happens you can transcend your communities. You are not them. They are not you. You have the freedom to dissent, but the perspective to dissent in a way that makes things better. You gain the ability to lead, to transform your communities toward better ends.
Seek perspective to gain resilience
Creating is hard. We are trying to bring something into the world that never existed before. Yes, it’s made from things. Yes draws inspiration from other sources, but it does not exist. That can take up every bit of energy and cleverness that we have.
It hurts to bear the slings and arrows. It hurts to grow. Just like physical effort, the creative effort sometimes leaves you drained.
But with perspective, you have more ability to bounce back and try again.
If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
When challenges happen, you can dig deeper and face them. When someone doesn’t like what you’re doing, you don’t have to avoid that. You can see if there is any kernel of truth that you can use. There is now a place for criticism from which it can help you.
How does perspective affect the creative process?
Seeking perspective first speeds things up. You have a direction and you can better identify goals and obstacles. In the moment, this leads to a more purposeful way of dealing with yourself.
You can make better use of small chunks of time
If you go out to create just any photograph, it’s like trying to write a school paper when you don’t care what topic you choose. That makes it harder to get started no easier. Especially if you’re under some time pressure.
If you already know what you need to accomplish, you can find ways to get something done in the time you have. If you don’t have the time to make the next thing you can now. You can still make creating easier in short intervals with things like:
- Brainstorming — about something — instead of about just anything dammitwhydon’tIhaveanyideas!!!1!1!!!1!
- Checking that phone app for the day the sun will be in the right position,
- Research a location,
- Arranging for your next trip,
- Contacting a person, or
- Doing some studio cleaning or setup.
All of this helps you to be in a better frame of mind to do your best work. You can think divergently and work without wasting time and cognitive resources on your inner senate.
Why consensus, approval and permission are still valuable
So why not throw out other people’s opinions entirely? Doesn’t some commencement speech or other say that I should?
To the extent that we construct ourselves, we negotiate the process socially to a great extent. Being is not a one-person job. It takes family, teachers, peers, and many other sources of input.
No artist is an island. Everyone builds with and on what already exists. Some of that is not just raw materials but inspiration, tropes, imagery, techniques, styles, philosophies, subject matter, etc. that others have used too.
Art cannot be rebellion forever
The core idea of art right now seems to be a rebellion against rules of art. Which are established by past rebellions.
We’re now getting so far from rules to rebel against, that rebellion itself becoming The Rule and art is approaching an antisocial parody of itself.
If the form of art is a war against itself, can it last? If it wins, it will destroy itself.
Even if that somehow works out for Art, I don’t think artists can really escape authorities and rules. See what happens when a student tries to violate the no-rules rules (even right now, if you’re curious, I’ll wait for you).
The gist is that an art student is told that his style of painting is not art and that he needs to change it. Whether the teachers are correct or not, the breaking-all-the-rules bit starts to look more like collective self-deception.
So then why seek perspective before rules?
Choose your rules wisely
Artists do what everyone does, they decide which rules apply and follow those. It’s not as romantic as the hyperbolic formulations of creativity, but I think it offers a much better explanation of it.
The black-and-white, all-or-nothing approach seems in itself immature. We don’t either obey all rules or no rules. We don’t listen to only our selves or only everyone else.
Instead, we decide who to listen to. If we have perspective, we can choose those authorities and their rules more wisely. (I just chose not to regard the rule about ending a sentence with a preposition, for instance.)
You choose new perspectives as you grow
Art is a product of and maybe a driver of an artist’s development. If an artist gets hung up at rebellion, it’s only a step or two farther than getting hung up at blind rule-following.
From where I am now, it appears that the way past this is perspective.
I’ll listen to artists and teachers who want to disagree with me (hey, comment and let me know where you think I’m wrong), but my working hypothesis is that a more fully developed, realized, grown up person will produce better art than an infantile person.
Remaining a baby physically is a bad way to have a professional sports career. Remaining a baby intellectually is a bad way to have a writing career. Why would remaining a baby work in other areas? Why wouldn’t it constantly cause you to expect more of yourself like every other discipline does? Why wouldn’t this quest put you in direct conflict with your own demons and flaws like every other quest eventually does?
Perspective helps you find the rules that matter. Because you cannot obey every set of rules out there. You cannot please everyone. You will work for a community, one that is at least influenced by authorities. Best to choose this wisely.
But what about consensus, isn’t that stultifying?
Well… you’re constrained now. You probably don’t think about it that much, but for example we have reached a consensus as a society that certain depictions are so wrong that we will imprison people for even distributing them.
Since on the internet you never know everyone you’re talking to, I’m going to take a moment to say this: if you want to make that kind of, abusive/exploitative “art,” you are a scumbag and I’m happy to alienate you. Most everyone in society is.
That may be irritating or may seem excessive, but it’s an example of the corrective influence of social contact. It is a sign that you need to change. Correct your course before you hurt yourself and other people irreparably. Get help if you need to.
For a less extreme, and more typical example, if you violate other norms, you probably will have trouble passing art school classes or selling your work.
Sometimes that is the right choice. We can choose which rules to violate, but we usually cannot choose to avoid the consequences. And I think there can be a kind of integrity and even therapy to making the art you want to make even if it isn’t going to pay.
Too large a scope for consensus is likely to create a logjam. If everyone in the world has to agree, you’re not gonna make it.
Even if you tried to start with consensus, you’d have to decide consensus among whom? That’s a perspective question.
What about permission?
I’m thinking of permission as more of a limited-scope consensus. You’re looking for someone to say you can. If you’re going to do that, you want to make sure that the person who says you can is someone other people also care about.
So their authority is community-derived. Just note that. If you choose an authority you’re also choosing a community.
If you start with permission, you have to choose a good authority. That means choosing a community — or maybe a collection of communities. You can do this either deliberately or mindlessly. If you want to be aware of what you are doing, again, you need to first have some perspective.
Approval
I’m thinking of approval here, as a sort of post hoc consensus. You do the work, and then see if people like it.
If you start with approval, you create without knowing how your community will react to your work. You also don’t avoid all of the scope problems that you’d have with permission and consensus.
Sometimes, this is a good way to get out from under that adolescent cacophony of hypothetical critics. Just start.
Don’t let this process be a way to get stuck.
Start!
This is a messy recursive process like most of human experience. But to the extent that you need steps, and definitely if you are feeling the sting of negative feedback, think about perspective, think about why you are creating. Because the purpose, the priorities, the perspective will help you to define success in a way that keeps you working.
At least that’s what I know so far. I am not yet an authority that you have to listen to. This is just my way of clarifying and preserving the thinking that is helping me to get out and create. And be and become.
So, have I persuaded you to seek perspective and place your work in a larger (social) context? Have I raised your ire? Let me know in the comments. And, if you liked the images in this post or the words about pictures, you can get more images and occasional words on Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter.