The Way to Fame

The mysteries and wonder of the creative process are not limited to those who by innate talent or arbitrary circumstance or some combination of both become successful. We can take successful anyway we want – the spectrum swings from being able to eat more than bread and cheese off the sole income from art to powdering your asshole with coke and fucking beautiful people. But is it only when you can rub two blank canvases together and sell the pair as an installation that one may call oneself an artist? Is it just to inhabit the state of mind that one is an artist to be an artist?

Of course not. Art is more than just a state of mind. It is a state of minds. Every artist touches themselves in the greatest feint of happiness and shyly mutters, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. Because even a wide as the widest circle of family and friends cannot buy enough of your work or show up at openings to make any human in being an artist. Not enough minds, y’ see. It takes a stranger’s opinion, an unknown quantity, to validate their deepest wish (see: creating something of influence and permanence and intangibility. See also: “Sticking it to the Man”). It is the kindness of strangers to care enough about the not-yet-art and top see value (perhaps with a red dot sticker) that has the inertia to begin the trajectory toward aforementioned artistic debauchery with the surety of the title ‘artist’.

(Note that not all ‘artists’ need to want to rim their assholes with coke or commit adultery – it is enough that the precedent has been set.)

And of course not all strangers are literate with art – apparently there are billions in ‘other’ countries that can’t even read – so it helps if the not-yet-art has some sovereign signifiers or features identifiable by the stranger-masses as acceptably belonging to the enterprise of art. I pity the fool who tries to claim the weather as their art (as inevitably someone will some day). Simplistic I know, but is any other sense of not-yet-art any more real?

So in the interests of safety and in a blatant attempt to exploit arbitrary nature of who makes it and who doesn’t, the time has come to publish a tome on a total unknown.

But I must digress momentarily to the concept of an ‘arbitrary nature’. Many may be tempted to – once it is known that outcomes are arbitrary – give up one the whole enterprise and take to the bottle. More fool them. Arbitrary does indeed mean random, but implicit to arbitrary is resolution. And a resolution means some course of action, some shunting of circumstances. It’s a numbers game. Increase the percentages. Like a lottery, the more ways you are open for the arbitrary (but inevitable!) thing to happen to you specifically you, the more chance there is that your particular circumstances will be shunted. Remember that word – shunt. So if you want to shunt, the only way is to whore yourself out to the milieu of coat-tail-riders that spin like satellites around the truly talented. Luckily most don’t know talent from bin juice so someone is always willing to pander to a little whoring. Whoring is not cheap, nor is it shameful. It is the oldest profession and its necessary to beat the urge to reproduce, and don’t artists want to be the last in the line of history, or at least have something of them survive to the last. So whore without reticence. Play the numbers. Aim to get shunted. And if you can, put it in a frame.

Who in this Brave New World can make things anew? The Artist! Who can draw blood from our modern hearts of stone? The Artist! Who can hear rhetoric and see a fluffy white clouds and a crocheted cosy? The Artist! Who can dress up terror in a snappy suit of grey tweed? The Artist! Who can see past the end of their nose to the end of their family unit? The Artist! Who among us can still box clever? The Artist! And all without drugs or hitting the bottle or scarring or little plaques on white walls that go so little a way to peeling away the layers – these are all Optional Extras. At root is the truth that like a succulent to the sun the artist must turn to the darkest corner of the human condition and there light a candle (or aim a blowtorch).

And no less an artist is s/he who shines that light in a button down outfit with a box of brownies to share. After all, everyone likes brownies. They look like the rest of the shit but that sugar hit sure does take the edge off.