Art & Religion: Defining Success and Setting Standards

How do you define success? This is a difficult question and is different for everyone. There isn’t a standard, per se (keep reading you might call me a liar). In my mind, to succeed means to accomplish what you set out to do. It’s really that simple. However, there are a lot of people that want to define success for you by their standards. This is where it gets weird.

I got thinking about this in relation to people’s photographic projects. I’m usually asking questions like, “Why are you making this work?” or asking what the work is about. Maybe the better question is, “How are you going to know if this work is successful?”

"Red Vineyards at Arles" - Vincent Van Gogh

A lot of artists, or people who call themselves artists, define success by two standards; the first one is selling work (or having people collect the work, which means it’s monetized) and two; exhibiting work (in museums, galleries, etc.). The second one usually needs to happen before the first one, but not always. We feel that if complete strangers put out a large amount of money to purchase our work, it means that our work is good. I’m not saying that this is true. And I’m not saying that it isn’t either. 

Selling work: These standards are so high, few can achieve them. Let me define what I mean; most artists will never sell any work. Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, “Red Vineyard at Arles” for 400 francs. This painting now resides at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The rest of Van Gogh's more than 900 paintings were not sold or made famous until after his death.

In this context, selling work to friends and family wouldn’t count. Or selling work at your local coffee shop for $25 doesn’t either. We’re talking about selling work for thousands of dollars or thousands of Euros.

Exhibiting work: This is easier than selling work, but there’s a different standard here, too. Local coffee shops or restaurants wouldn’t qualify as a proper exhibition space. The standard here is defined by exhibiting in well known, or established galleries and moreover, galleries that support and believe in your work (called representation).

So, are you totally depressed yet? You should be, most artists will never achieve one of these standards, let alone both.

What do we make of this? I think it should draw us back to defining success for ourselves. It could be that these standards are your map for success. And it could be that you have no interest in defining success for your work in this way.

Art can’t be defined in the way physics can. Art is like religion; everyone has the right one and believes they’re correct. How can you argue with that? I can’t tell you that what you believe is wrong, moreover, prove that you’re wrong, at least not in a way that we can have a discussion about it. For those of you that have heard me lecture, this is where I say, “I feel lusciously gray”.

So there needs to be some kind of standard. Is this relative or absolute? If you ask the artists that feel they’ve succeeded, they will tell you there’s a standard and that they know how to define that standard.

Truth be told, most people never think about this, they make photographs (or whatever they work with) and do it for “fun” or post it to Facebook and get really nice comments and a lot of “likes”. That’s reward enough for them. Others have a completely different definition of success and think about this a lot."Rex Rideout with Gas Mask & Knife" - 16x20 BGA - 2013

Maybe someday, we’ll have a place where we can sort all of this out and find out what it means to make successful work in a balanced and supportive environment (not Facebook!). Until then, we have to define success on our own terms and in our own ways.