For the first time since 2009, I’m ill. This makes it sound like I have an amazing immune system; actually, I just didn’t really leave the house for about 18 months. Hence, this cold is really kicking my ass. I probably picked it up when my parents threw a party to mark their 40th wedding anniversary, and people came into our house. Alas, it is too late to screen these visitors in a Michael Jackson-style, and so I am laid up in bed, honking the contents of my nose into tissues every five minutes, rather than sitting outside doing watercolours.

I had meant to do some scanning of the more recent watercolours, but most things are beyond me. I would like to be working hard, but I keep being forced back into bed – I even resorted to watching Mission Impossible 3, in the hope that it would pummel my few working braincells into slumber.

Art-world brainiac Iris Priest was recently commissioned to work with a group of artists in the Newcastle area on a project called “Chance Find Us“, writing essays documenting their practice by studio visits. The artists concerned are all fairly successful people, and Iris ruminates on their practice in a footnote-cum-comment:

..Something I have found interesting, but haven’t addressed in this blog, about meeting Pete and the other Chance Finds Us artists is the ways in which they negotiate issues such as slowness and a rigorous adherence to the truth of their practices (“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Lao Tzu) in relation to an art market which demands fast, consistent and prolific production of (mainly sellable) work.

This fine balancing act between allowing the work to have the time and mental-space it requires to manifest (and having the time to make mistakes) and the necessity of profitability, sustainability and meeting the requirements of the gallery can sometimes be difficult and I didn’t want to write about it in a post because I didn’t want my observations to be seen as reflecting the ideas or opinions of any of the individuals interviewed, or the group as a whole. And it is a tricky subject.

But I have had along time to think about it since these meetings and, though it may not be entirely relevant to the writing as a whole, it’s something I’m interested to examine as the project progresses and I meet/ write about the work of the other (both represented and unrepresented) artists in the group. Though I’m painfully aware that we have to make money to survive as artists, writers and human beings, I also think increasingly that – perhaps contrary to that necessity – the adherence to the truth of the work has to come before the commercial concerns… even if it costs us greater public visibility or our breakfasts. Something I’ve been happy to see in the work of all these artists (though unhappily that it hasn’t always afforded all of them that dirty word ‘success’ they deserve) is the unwavering commitment to the process and to finding the truth at the heart of what they do…

Artistic practice takes time to emerge. It takes time, effort, and work, and those artists that find success with the stuff from their graduate show are never the most interesting. This idea collides with an interview I have read on my sick-bed, with television writer Dan Harmon, who says:

… there’s a lot of shit out there, and it is hard to find the good stuff. But we can’t look at that as a cause-effect relationship where if we limit the total amount of stuff, it would therefore become easier to find the good stuff. Ten years ago, if you turned on a U.S. network, you might be watching a basic cable show that was supposed to be sort of edgy, but you were really just watching something by the lowest level of Hollywood insiders who got a really cheap, shitty deal. [...] It’s the same thing that we just watched happen with music. You get more and more crap, and it seems more and more mechanical and more and more joyless in the sort-of mainstream, but then you also get hopefully more and more—I don’t know—Becks? Sure, there’s a whole bunch more crap now, but everything that makes it possible for there now to be all this crap also makes it possible for you to define yourself and pick your friends and pick your artists in a really, really specific way that you were never able to do back when there was less crap.

My communications professor, before I dropped out of college, summed up the first semester by saying, “Everybody, every year, with every new invention, always tries to decide whether its effects are good or bad, and you will find that the final answer is—there’s always more good and always more bad.”

So, there’s always going to be more stuff around, and the barrier for entry keeps getting dropped. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to make a TV program, you had to be an insider enough to get access to a TV studio. These days, you could do it on your phone and upload it to some video-hosting site. Of course, it would probably be shite, but if you kept doing it? And you kept getting your friends to watch it, and star in it, and tell their friends?

Well, you’d probably learn a lot about getting people to do things for you. Even if you never learnt how to make good TV. You’d have learnt how to get people to keep watching your awful practice-runs at making a good TV program, for starters, and that’s going to become more important according to historian Venkatesh Rao:

Attention behaves the same way. Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

[...]

Each new pocket of attention is harder to find: maybe your product needs to steal attention from that one TV obscure show watched by just 3% of the population between 11:30 and 12:30 AM. The next displacement will fragment the attention even more. When found, each new pocket is less valuable. There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.

Rao’s whole article is worth reading, as it explores the recent history of our weird banking system by explaining the history of corporations. But his point above, which I lifted from the amazing link-blog Kottke.org, points out a truth that the television writer Dan Harmon was struggling to get out; there’s always more of everything, because there is a financial drive to get you to consume something different. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing; I would hate to live in a world where our choices of what to buy, watch, or read are constantly getting smaller.

But what I am saying, and what I take Iris Priest to be saying in her comment, is that you have to focus hard to produce something of quality. That’s just the first stage of making something you’re proud of.