Art for Humans – It’s Never the One You Want

Art for Humans – It’s Never the One You Want – by Alexander Cardinale.

When you make art for the public unless you’re an already established artist with a fanatical following, everything you put out is a bit of a gamble. Will the people like the work? Will the people even see the work? You can and will spend hours upon hours painstakingly working on a piece of art and you won’t know what people will think or what about it they’ll even see, putting your work out there is always a gamble. I’ve been putting my work out there since I was a young teenager and I certainly have no plans to stop, so I can say this with confidence when your work does hit. It’s never the one you want.

Now your work getting praise and being seen and shared around is always a good thing and no, you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth for sure but… you can’t blame me or anyone else when the high of our work being recognized is ever so slightly soured by which art it is. As I previously said putting your work out is a gamble, you’re betting your own skill at art against the odds of people’s attention spans and in a more modern world, website algorithms as well. It’s two against one here and none of our odds are good, so after you create a few hard works of passion and creativity and are met with deafening silence you may finally give in and look for what’s popular, what’s trending, and what’s going to get you see. You sit down and draw or paint or whatever medium you are with, and you finally shake off that bitter feeling you had for hopping on a trend as you start to really like the art you’re making despite the fact you felt forced to do it. Then you finally put it out into the world, timed perfectly with the height of the trend’s relevance, and then… still more silence.

You lost the gamble, you put your hope and time up as the bet, and the house collected on you without a single thought. Then about a week later you without thinking about it post a doodle or a work-in-progress image. The total time it took was around an hour so far and half of that time was a bathroom break and of course, this is the artwork seen by the many. You lost at the casino and won at the arcade one dollar stuffed animal claw machine. Support, likes, people cheering you on to do more come pouring in and you should feel on top of the world but you’re being dragged back down to earth just a bit by the fact that this wasn’t what you wanted to be seen by the many. It’s just a doodle or an image of work that isn’t even finished but it’s the one that won and you have to keep gambling your hope and time right after this dies down.

So it might leave you just a little sore but at the end of the day, up-and-coming artists need to take any victories they can even if your one-hundred-hour masterpiece was out done by your one-hour doodle. When you gamble it’s best to take your winnings and leave but we artists are always stuck on that artistic casino floor and we need each and every win to keep us going.

So maybe don’t look directly in the mouth of your gift horse but maybe glance at it from the side just to keep yourself sane.

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