It is difficult to achieve an authentic, creative life in a world that overwhelmingly privileges commercial gain, measurable success and indiscriminate attention of any kind; a world in which the value of a creative work is defined more by the capital it produces than by the authenticity of its message.
By capital I mean both hard currency and cultural reach — an insatiable need for attention of any kind, often called relevance, and most commonly manifest as likes, views and subscribers. Not only can these be leveraged for financial gain, but they create an intoxicating amount of psychological satisfaction, at least in the short term. The value of being seen, even unfavorably, has usurped the value of adding something of substance into the stream of the collective consciousness.
Algorithmic dynamics exacerbate this trend, encouraging creators to post broadly-targeted (dumbed down) work as often as humanly possible and with a cynical eye for market trends. Hence the current deluge of poor to mediocre content flooding every field, genre and platform.
Such work is generally characterized by an across-the-board lack of complexity. Eager to avoid challenging the reader in any way, it tends to be stylistically bland and philosophically rudimentary. Occasionally, a creator will harness inflammatory, controversial content to generate attention, but the end result is always the same: Relevance leveraged for material gain.
In our current landscape, quality work is still available, but has become subsumed by quantity as even a cursory glance at any social media platform (including Medium) will affirm.
To navigate this world without compromising one’s creative integrity is a difficult task. Some argue that it is impossible.
Creative Integrity is Personal Authenticity
What does it mean to insist on creative authenticity, both in the work produced and the process used to produce it?
Ultimately, only the individual artist can answer this question through the prism of their own goals and sensibilities. My personal concept of creative integrity is based on the assumption that all humans have a base essence (often referred to as their authentic self), which becomes easily muddied by social pressures and norms. A large part of our existential struggle blooms from our attempts to resist these pressures and return to the purity of childhood. The more faithfully you honor your essence with your art, the more integrity your work will have.
Note that honoring your essence does not mean explicitly expressing it or working solely within its thematic boundaries. One’s best work need not specifically reference their own life. Rather, one’s essence manifests when the artist expresses what they must express (vision subject and theme) without calculating potential rewards. Such work is typically unaffected by popular trends and market forces, although it may inadvertently align with them, if the artist is lucky.
In this way, the artist divorces their basic methods of development, revision and delivery from the fluctuating laws of the commercial sphere, which invests in authenticity only to the extent that it produces reward.
This is the kind of artist who has something inside them that refuses to rest, that compulsively demands to be channeled into creative effort. This artist creates for the sheer joy of creation, valuing process over product. Their standards are their own, their subjects sacred.
Maybe you have tried at times to suppress this kind of creative impulse, to pursue a more practical way of life, a career or business venture, attempting to treat your art as a hobby or something you do when time allows.
And maybe you’ve discovered that this is impossible, that the creative act demands a place at the center of your existence, asserting itself as your primary vocation, around which all other work becomes secondary. This is a matter of focus rather than time as the reality of late stage capitalism requires that we spend the majority of our hours working for pay. Even so, creative effort must remain the factor that most justifies our existence.
I personally do not consider myself to have a career. I certainly don’t identify with my job title. I am grateful for my nine-to-five job, which keeps me engaged with the world and affords me food, shelter and other necessities while I pursue creative projects. But on some level, it remains a necessary evil, certainly inasmuch as it demands so much of my time.
Maybe you have not experienced things at such extremes, yet remain compelled to take your artistic projects more seriously than the world is willing to reward you for.
To various extent, most artists face the same tension between the need to create and the need to function in material society. Our trouble is that dedication, craft and authenticity do not equal financial viability and at times may even jeopardize it. If we’re lucky, the work we do will have some kind of market value. By all means celebrate this as good fortune. But when it does not, we are often faced with the temptation to give up, or make compromises that dilute the essence of our work so that it better meets the demands of the market.
The voice of our true self demands that create this, and the voice of the market demands that we create that. Unless these two overlap, we are unlikely to find fulfilment.
In such cases, we are left with a bruising sense of self-betrayal, the lingering knowledge that we have lied to ourselves, that we are profaning something sacred for profit or esteem.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that commercial success automatically constitutes inauthenticity or inferior artistry. Many superlative works have successfully generated both financial profit and cultural cache and represent particular value as they nudge mass culture and consumption towards a more advanced states of consciousness. But these works remain the exception rather than the rule.
Of course, life rarely unfolds in such neatly delineated extremes and not every compromise we make will constitute an absolute betrayal of our creative essence. Nor will we necessarily recognize our compromises as we make them, understanding only later the ways in which we fell short of realizing our vision. Falling short is an inevitable aspect of the human experience and becomes instructive when recognized and harnessed as a catalyst for change.
Some will argue that consistent compromise is unavoidable and that to refuse the demands of a broader audience is a stubborn and insufferable form of entitlement. It is certainly presumptuous to expect your most essential truth to appeal to an audience, but it is not for other people alone that we make art.
Ultimately, creating art is a way of life, a deeply personal experience, which needs no external justification. It is both an audacious, self-serving claim to the value of our own experience, and an empathetic, profoundly human desire to enrich the lives of others through it.
The fact remains; if our authenticity is not immediately appealing to enough people at a given time, then there is little we can do but proceed without excessive reward or redefine what reward means.
To accomplish the latter, we must make the profit outcome less relevant than the creative experience itself, the act of making art, which becomes the hinge on which the other parts of our life swing. To be seen, read, listened to or acknowledged is surely a viable goal for most artists. But it should not be the defining factor in their decision to create.
This is the minefield we navigate as committed artists, and I would caution you to consider that many little compromises quickly add up to a bigger betrayal, often realized far too late and when we have become accustomed to the seductive comforts of a compromised integrity.
Sometimes it is late at night, when we cannot sleep, that the sheerest clarity comes to us and we see clearly for the first time what we were and what we have become. It is perfectly possible to shuffle inch by inch of the edge of a cliff.
Of course, I have only scratched the surface of this ongoing, ever-evolving issue. But one thing seems particularly clear; as the content landscape grows ever-larger and artificial intelligence develops at pace, the terms of success will become increasingly complicated, and the authenticity of individual experience increasingly important.
Artificial intelligence can already outperform humans in creating bland, easily-consumed content at scale. It can already generate competent written work and is rapidly improving in the fields of photography, art and design. Video will be next, followed by music.
To outmaneuver this, we will need to be more authentic, more human, less inclined to produce for the machine.
So create honestly. Make whatever you want, however you want. Revel in the experience without hope or expectation. Don’t wonder who is looking. Paradoxically, this might be the key to creating work that others cannot ignore.
Let’s talk again soon
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