The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Most of us artists are too sensitive for this world. We’re delicate flowers, blooming nocturnally, our precious scent wafting on the tidal emanations of the moon and lost before dawn. By day we’re ambivalent about our talents. We torture ourselves with questions of skill and worse, of imagination, wondering if we made a mistake pursuing a trade whose rewards are certainly not monetary in a society that judges us by our profit and loss. In daylight we dance with our demons. By nightfall we listen to bacchanalian howls echoing from ravines back in our suspect imaginations.

We are our worst critics. We are our biggest admirers. The push and pull could drive an ordinary person crazy. It certainly does us. Caught between that spark of creativity and the dark shadow it costs, we are trapped between the jitterbug and the dirge, yo-yos to our own ambivalence, see-sawing away until paralysis or delirium gets a grip on our inner child, the spoiled brat who craves attention but wilts under criticism.

And god help us if we find ourselves suddenly ‘marketable’. Try a new style, a variation, an experimental approach, but the buying public may only want that last painting, the hit song, the first novel. The pressure will be to replicate, to plagiarize ourselves, to stay with the tried and true and tired. The saleable. Even the Masters sold out. Dali signing thousands of prints, Picasso scribbling iconic doodles, the spark slowly dying while the money rolls in. It’s a trap, a curse, a blessing, a living. A starving artist, and you can quote me, is a far better artist than a famous ones in their old age, nine times out of ten. The trouble is, eight of them will just give up.

What I tell the kids I sometimes inflict my wisdom on is this: get a part-time job to pay the rent, don’t buy a new car, live frugally, do NOT go into debt. And above all else, keep making art whether it sells or not. And if it sells, keep pushing your limit. Keep experimenting. And whatever you do, don’t amputate ears or other body parts. It’s only art, not life and death. Or you can do what I do and tell yourself every damn day, it beats working for a living….

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I listened to a report recently on public radio extolling the virtues of using Instagram to further an artist’s career. As an artist with a career in definite need of a jumpstart, I paid close attention, figuring maybe a tutorial in social media might be just my ticket to fame and fortune. They featured two artists, the first being some guy I’d never heard of (no surprise since I don’t subscribe to Instagram) who painted colorful murals but apparently didn’t make enough money to quit his day job. So, using the power of a photographic platform, he marketed his art on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Sometimes he tried out new mural designs, see what folks bought and what folks wished he’d never drawn. Democratic art, I guess, vote for the winning design.

The other artist was a painter and she was doing okay on Instagram but complained how it sucked up all her time trying to stay current, keep posting, respond to her fans and adoring public. She admitted she was thinking of dropping off the social media rat race, maybe spend some time making art instead. She mentioned how her fanbase would almost always respond negatively to about anything new or different she was trying out — they only wanted the tried and true.

There are folks I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet who think good art is defined by its sales potential. If it sells, it’s good. If it doesn’t, probably bad art. Nice, I guess, to have a quantifiable definition. Jeff Koons’ stainless steel rabbit just sold for 91 million dollars to the dad of our current Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, making Koons the greatest living artist of our time. Give me a break. The guy’s a PR guy who couldn’t, as one critic once said, carve his name on a tree, the kind of putz who photographed himself having anal sex with his Italian porn star wife and calling it art. Jeff would have loved Instagram.

I don’t pretend to be the final arbiter of what good art is. I just know it isn’t what sells the most. Otherwise I’d probably be printing T-shirts and coffee cups with stained glass designs, probably only the ones my clamoring fans bought multiples of. The danger, at least to me, of being an artist is falling into the trap of following the money. I’d rather have a crappy day job if money was the goal. Which, I guess, is why I was a graveyard shift orderly for 10 lousy years. Okay, a crappy night job. Beats boxing up those T-shirt orders, if nothing else.

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