It’s a tough banana to split, knowing how much better you could be while trying to convince yourself you’re good enough. The more one improves the more capable one becomes of seeing room for improvement. Now, the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that at the highest level of skill one becomes able to confidently assess one’s ability as being extremely high. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone at this level of skill. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect ever reaching that point, at least not in the near future. The experience of art that I have now is probably close to the experience that I can expect for the next decade: Being better than many, but also just good enough to see how much worse I am than I could be.
The good news is that this is one of the exact traits – along with enthusiasm, patience, and, I dunno, talent if that’s a real thing – that I will need to improve. The bad news is that it’s real fucking annoying.
Skill isn’t everything. I mean, when it comes to art it’s hard to even quantify what skill means. The idea that being a skilled painter equated to perfect photo-realism went out of style when cameras came in and did that job better. Who the hell even knows what being a good writer means? We just know it when we read it. Except we usually don’t, considering the career of Dan Brown, who I’ve never read but also I don’t want to because I’ve heard he sucks and I believe it. We have the production of near-identical ‘good’ movies down to such a science that people hunger for less competently made films in the hope that they at least provide something new and interesting. Good art and bad art are mostly just signifiers of what we value, nothing intrinsic to the work. Skill is the ability to produce the thing that’s closest to what you think of as good art.
It’s a real pain in the ass if what you think of as good doesn’t line up with what other people think of as good. When that happens, the better you get, the less you rely on cliche, the further away you drift from what people want. Poor Van Gogh, making the best paintings he could in a style only he could achieve, and no one wanted them. Only later did the definition of good art shift enough to make room for his work.
That’s the third rail in this banana split: Even if one were to somehow achieve perfection, to perfectly realize the dream art floating in your brain, to really pour yourself onto paper or canvas or celluloid, whether that’s ‘good’ or not depends more on the world than it does on you. Which is why most of the job, the actual work of being an artist, if you want an audience, if you want money, is to convince people that whatever it is you’re doing is ‘good’ – to bring their idea of good art into alignment with your own by any means available.
It’s bad news for those of us who have just been locking ourselves away and practicing. We got to the late game and realized we leveled up the wrong skills. Of course, if food and medicine and shelter weren’t issues, we could roll with it, hope that maybe someday the world’s tastes would coincidentally come along and align with our own, just like they did too late for Van Gogh. Unfortunately, we don’t have that sort of leeway.
Maybe not by nature, but by necessity, making art is a sales position.