An oft-repeated and much-pondered question around art is: “is art for the artist, or the audience?”
I want to answer that question.
First of all, if art weren’t somehow for the artist, it wouldn’t be worth doing. People can become commercial artists as a job, sure, but before that they have to be interested in drawing or singing. Those skills don’t just come from nowhere, which means careers in art don’t just come from nowhere.
So at the very least we know that art is not purely for the audience. Or at least it shouldn’t be, or you end up with Disney stars’ pop albums — which are not art, they’re auditory junk food. So we’re good there.
But at the other end of the spectrum lies “but is it just for the artist?”
David Bowie might say that it is. In this interview Bowie, a legendary rock star, says to never play for the gallery. Never make art to fulfill other people’s expectations — do what you want to do.
But I don’t think he means by this what some people think he means. He’s not arguing for stubborn selfishness, he’s not arguing to condemn other people’s taste; he’s arguing for honesty with pen and paper, and honesty in the studio. He’s arguing that for art to be worth it in the first place, it has to do something for you as the artist. And if you manage that, chances are you'll manage to do something for the audience too. Because it's honest.
There’s a difference between an artist playing for himself and the audience, and an artist playing just for himself. I’ve seen people answer this question with “well it’s for the artist. If the audience doesn’t like how I express myself, that’s their problem.” But this answer has very “just be yourself, fuck what the world thinks” vibes, which is no good either.
What is good art?
If everyone was “just themselves,” the world would be an anarchic nightmare. There are rules, regulations, social contracts, and useful constraints around people’s behavior for a reason. Part of being an adult is giving up some of the things you want so that others can have some of the things they want, and doing things in service of others. If part of “who you naturally are” is being loud in a library, that doesn’t make you a free spirit. It makes you a jackass.
In matters of personality, there are things that are bad and there are things that are good.
Now of course you’ll never find one personality that pleases everyone. Unless you’re Tom Hanks. Or Keanu Reeves. Or Michael Keaton. Or Judi Dench. Or Betty White. Or Sir Ian McKellen. Or Benedict Cumberbatch. Or Aragorn, son of Arathorn. Let me start over.
Now of course it’s very hard to find one personality that pleases everyone. Nor is it likely to find one piece of art that pleases everyone. But we can all agree that people are more interested in Sir Ian McKellen than they are in some narcissistic drunk from South Side Chicago, the same way they’re more interested in Van Gogh’s The Starry Night than they are in a crayon drawing on some grandmother’s fridge.
In this essay, Paul Graham explores how there is such a thing as good and bad art. Because there are things people do find interesting, and things people don’t find interesting. It can also be measured by things that people enjoy or don’t enjoy, things that inspire people or don’t inspire people, things that lift the spirit or things that do nothing for the spirit (or even dampen it).
On the spectrum between those two extremes is where you discover good art. It can be hard to define, but we know that it exists. Because people have preferences. As long as large groups of people like a thing better than they like another thing, there is such a thing as good and bad art.
And as long as there is good and bad art, art will never be purely for the artist. Because people want and need it. If you’re sharing art with an audience, you’re implicitly accepting responsibility to deliver at least something that people want. You’re signing up and saying “I think I can deliver some of that.” Otherwise you wouldn’t and shouldn’t share it. In that case, it would be just for you, and we'd never hear about it and it wouldn't be part of this conversation.
I don’t think Bowie was childish or selfish, because he didn’t say “fuck the world.” He was a gentleman. He shared his art hoping that it would move people. But he started by trying things that were interesting to him — he used himself as a proxy for the audience. That’s where art that intends to have an audience begins.
As Wynton Marsalis said, music is always for the listener… but the first listener is the player.
And then look at something like software: there is nothing that matters other than user experience. If you make a piece of software that has no users, because it’s clunky or people just don’t find it useful… then it’s not a good piece of software. It doesn’t matter how cute or creative it is if no one likes it.
I think most people who write great software are people whose own problems that software solves. So, like a musician who hears a song idea in his head and then really wants to hear it again, a software developer has a solution to a problem for which he himself is the target audience. So, again, the pattern repeats: the artist may (or maybe even must) be acting on his own behalf, to help himself get somewhere. And the goal is that it’s also something other people want.
But then, and this is the important part, the art becomes the property of its users.
Expectations
Why is it that art can make people angry? Well, usually if art makes people angry, it has something to do with expectations. Not expectations about who someone is as an artist, but expectations about what someone is “paying for.” What someone can reasonably expect to have delivered to them.
(For instance, people get extremely angry at Windows bugs and errors because, considering Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on planet earth, their software is still pretty fucking terrible.)
Imagine a painter produced some prints of his work and you bought one. But it turns out that his prints are all different from the original, because he wanted to “express himself as an artist.” He wanted to express himself on your dollar. So the painting you ended up with is literally not the one you paid for.
This is what it’s like to go see a singer play live and watch them sing all the songs you love terribly.
There's a reason people came to see you live — it’s because they fell in love with the songs the way they are on the album. To charge people money for a certain song and then sing them a different song is at best false advertising, and at worst an outright scam.
I would bet you money, for instance, that zero people on earth would pay for Fergie’s album if she sang the whole thing the way she sang the national anthem. Because it was an absolutely hideous performance. It was just unpleasant. It was bad art.
So as an artist, your own prerogative can produce the art, sure. That’s where it starts. But once the art is published and shared, it’s really not yours anymore.
One of the most offensive things in the world is when people try to make the Star-Spangled Banner their own song.
No.
I’m not even a patriot, per se, but I mean… come on. Have some respect. That song doesn’t belong to you. It doesn’t even belong to Francis Scott Key anymore, and hasn’t since he wrote it. It belongs to the American public. So please, Fergie, just sing the fucking song.
I see YouTube videos where people will go off on silly tangents, incorporate awful humor that no one finds funny, and do distracting little things that just make the video more of a chore to watch. And by the end of the 8-minute video, there was only 40 seconds’ worth of substance.
Your goal as an artist is to make your art interesting and enjoyable. If you make your art a pain in the ass to enjoy, you’re not an artist. You’re a toddler.
So the question, really, is “how much does my audience own this art?” And the answer is not zero. The answer is never “my audience does not own this art at all,” if you’re sharing art with the public.
The answer, then, is… to whatever extent you’re sharing your art with the world, and to whatever extent they want and need something from it, it’s for them. Not you. It’s theirs, not yours. You were simply the one who created it, possibly got paid for it, and, in the case of music, must continue to deliver it.
This is an unsatisfying answer. But it’s the only answer that's fair to the audience.
Now this isn’t to say that you can’t do whatever you want as an artist. Because you can. You are free to experiment and try new things. You are free to put out a prog rock album or paint your first abstract painting.
But once the art belongs to your audience, you have to be very careful about messing with it.
It might go well — as in Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan, which is a concert album that improved upon their studio work. Their performance here actually became people's preferred way to listen to Cheap Trick.
Or it can go very unwell, which is what often happens when people sing songs live with extraneous notes and unnecessary fills.
If you do take new risks with art after the public already has it, it ought to be in service to the audience, not yourself. Like a piece of software iterated based on user feedback. It ought to be because you are deeply in touch with your audience — you know what sounds good, you know what your audience likes, and you’re willing employ a bit of common sense.
In the case of Fergie, she was not doing that for the audience at all. She was doing it for herself. That's the difference, and that's why it was such a terrible performance. Or Kurt Cobain. It’s almost unbelievable how bad he was live — and he never sang the same way twice.
If you’re going to see jazz improv, you get what you pay for. Improv is what you’re paying for.
But I’ve heard countless Gen X’ers say they went to see concerts in the ‘80s, and “the band was trying out their new stuff and it was awful” or “they were terrible live because they were all drunk and shit.” That’s a problem. Because people paid to come and hear you play the music on the album. And it goes without saying, they came to hear you play it well. If you can’t do that, people shouldn’t be paying you.
Here’s one more example. If you write a mainstream blog and build an audience, and start charging people money for your writing… and then after you have their money you start writing about a bunch of obscure shit that no one wants to read about… your audience is going to be let down. Because that’s not what they paid for; you bait-and-switched them.
So what’s the difference? The difference is the element of surprise. That is, there probably shouldn’t be any. Unless it's a positive surprise.
If your audience pays for something after they already know what you’ve delivered, you’re free to do whatever you like. That’s what Bowie was talking about. You can take whatever creative freedoms you want as an artist, before you make people pay for it. Before you give people something to cling to. And then you offer the new stuff to them. They can hear the album at a friend’s house, and decide whether or not they want to buy it. They can see the painting in public, and decide they want to buy an identical print.
So we can take Bowie’s advice and never play for the gallery — never make art that we ourselves don’t want to make. But once we do make the art, it no longer belongs to us. It belongs to the audience. And we have to respect that.
Drink some water and do not under any circumstances sing like Kurt Cobain.
JDR
“The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.” - Simon McBurney
"...the pattern repeats: the artist may (or maybe even must) be acting on his own behalf, to help himself get somewhere. And the goal is that it’s also something other people want.
But then, and this is the important part, the art becomes the property of its users. " This also explains why most artists struggle to make money. Bowie's argument must have been that if you make what you like, and it is good, it will attract the 'right' audience. But sometimes that doesn't happen or doesn't go as expected i.e. Claude Monet and Impressionism. Some artists may be ahead of their time etc. I think most artists have a constant struggle between making whatever they like and making what their audience would like (which some see as selling out) for the sake of commercial success. You have given me some thoughts on how to resolve that tension!
"Here’s one more example. If you write a mainstream blog and build an audience, and start charging people money for your writing… and then after you have their money you start writing about a bunch of obscure shit that no one wants to read about… your audience is going to be let down. Because that’s not what they paid for; you bait-and-switched them."
Starting to pop up on Substack as well. Naturally understandable. Most content creators, artist and rock singers certainly included, during their growth stage more or less have to cater to their audience, else they would lack the resources to continue their creation. However resources once gained, unleashes them to artistic (and financial) freedom. With such sudden freedom and power to express, "experimentation" is impossible to resist, and staying true to the original style almost always becomes the exception. It has become easier and easier for me to downgrade or cancel a subscription these days.