It’s important that artists remind themselves what giving your creative output autonomy means.
It means that you will never know all the people your work will matter to. You’ll never be able to measure it. You’ll never be able to witness it. You’ll maybe witness, if you’re lucky, some traces of what it means to people. But in all likelihood, the vast majority of people who your work matters to won’t ever reach out to you or show you what it means.
It’s not possible to trace the path of meaning that your work will follow. And that’s part of what’s exciting and amazing about it, even though that’s also what makes it really hard to let go. We fool ourselves with this illusion of control over our creative output. We have no control. I mean I could talk about our lack of control in the process of making it too, but that’s kind of beside the point for this pep talk.
The celebrity-oriented attention economy of social media tricks us into thinking that what we make only matters if a bazillion people listen to it or a bazillion people pay attention to it, and that’s not true. It just is not.
René Kladzyk, at https://thecreativeindependent.com/essays/a-pep-talk-for-doing-it-yourself/
art quote – Kladzyk 11.4 2021
Rachel Imsland, Artist 