This is great and you're of great inspiration to young artists or simply anybody that wants to pursue their dreams.
I think that living a humble life doing simple things that don't necessarily lead to professional success, is still a very noble lifestyle. The pressure society has brought upon us to follow our dreams, simply because it's nice to follow your dreams, is a bit of a pipe dream.
What I'm trying to say is that success isn't objective, it cannot be measured with the amounts of projects you've built, or with the amounts of professional artworks you've produced. Success is being happy about the simple things in life, whether these are output of your work (art, code, music, etc.) or experiences you've had in life.
I'm not sure this is true. You can be happy with work that anyone skilled in the art thinks is terrible, i.e. maybe you're really proud of your $REGISTER_GLOBALS dependent, SQLi-vulnerable, spaghetti PHP app. Maybe you're really happy with your scientific paper that the peer review community has ripped to shreds as false. Or you really, really like the novel you wrote, despite well-articulated and uniformly scathing takedowns from editors, English professors, literary critics, etc.
Or, conversely, you're a perfectionist and kicking yourself over the single calculation mistake in an otherwise field-defining paper, masterful performance, etc.
When you participate in a craft, there are measures and standards of quality orthogonal to your emotions, and they matter a great deal in determining whether a work is successful.
What I think OP was saying was that the success of /an individual/, not the work he puts out, is not objective. There are certainly objective standards of quality for the work an individual creates. I think OP's point was that even a person who's put out nothing but unsuccessful work is a successful person if he is happy with it.
Humorous, but relevant. PHP and Wordpress are derided by many, perhaps rightfully so. Despite many well founded claims against them they remain ubiquitous.
Which metric do we use to define success here? Can shitty software be considered successful just because everyone uses it?
People don't buy a drill, they buy a hole in the wall.
People don't buy the best most perfect fancy publishing platform, they buy something that lets them publish their content and move on with their lives.
People have built businesses thanks to that shitty software, important news have been broken by tech unsavvy bloggers that created a website very easily thanks to the platform, hordes of youngsters approached programming writing a shitty Wordpress plugin...
You would still call that a failure just because it doesn't use elegant software according to the standards of a community of professional that never come to terms with its hindering perfectionism?
"Or you really, really like the novel you wrote, despite well-articulated and uniformly scathing takedowns from editors, English professors, literary critics, etc."
This description != a worthless piece of art.
E.L. James is probably the most obvious recent example of someone who is almost universally decried by the above professions, but still writes something that at the very least is enjoyed by a lot of people. However, there are dozens of - often very successful and much-beloved - writers who fit the same description.
Defining quality in art is a very, very difficult proposition.
On a side note, there are plenty of dreadfully-written, insecure, $register_globals - dependent PHP apps out there solving real problems for real people.
The one objective measure of success in art is mastery of technique, which is something the kind of dedication and practice he has done can produced. A mature artist of any kind should be able to deliberately set out to create a particular effect or experience for their audience, and create a work that has that effect or produces that experience.
This is a reasonable goal for artists to pursue, because it's one that only really depends on them, and they are unlikely to be successful by any other measure without it.
I could not disagree more. What you are describing is craft and not art. Not to say that one is in any way better or more valuable, only that once something has a firm set of "particular effects or experiences" it have moved on from art and into the world of craft.
Some realms of art still entertain this definition for art, but you are correct in that the vast majority of modern art is exactly this distinct departure from the notion that one must have an audience. Modern art came about because of the rise of the bourgeoisie, meaning, people of different classes could commission works, artists had more freedom in what they chose to depict, sell, create, etc, instead of being limited to being commissioned by the church or by nobility.
But you are getting into a debate that hasn't really been resolved in modern art either, this has been a debate in the concept of kitsch and collage, dada, Greenberg, photography, etc.
If you want to dance around the question linguistically, that's all fine and good, but there are people in the world who believe that art must be sold and there are people in the world who find value in it other than the fact that it sells. You've got the past and the contemporary interpretations of art conflated with the trends of culture. Plus, these circles weave and web together, people derive influence and inspiration from all sorts of places, art comes to mean different things depending on who is listening, who is speaking/painting/etc.
I mean, there is obviously either a rigid definition for Art which has no form in language and is thus inexpressible for all eternity despite the various shapes it may manifest as, or art is something else. No, just kidding, I have no idea what I'm patring on about.
I remember seeing a doco that was discussing the 'what is art' question. My favourite response was from an eccentric artist/rancher, who had made the three letters A R T in giant vinyl-covered foam blocks, and stacked them against a fence. His opinion on the definition question "What is 'art'?": 'art' is three letters up against a fence.
My favorite definition is in this footage of Gordon Pask speaking of the liberty to adventure, not limited to artists but also very common to sciences. Art and science are ways of questioning or proving asumptions about the world and that requires to asume risks. There is no risk in mastery.
https://youtu.be/fifSXXS8fU4
Some amount of craft may be necessary to produce successful art, but the success/quality of art is not monotonic with the level of difficulty of the craft involved.
Very simple, low-skill artworks can be extremely powerful. Artworks that took 20,000 hours of practice can be dull.
It's not about difficulty, it's about mastery. It takes thousands of hours of practice to be able to draw the perfect line. Even if drawing said perfect line took seconds.
A large part of mastery also goes beyond the technicalities of expressing, it's also about having a good eye for what is worth expressing and what is mundane/boring/etc.
But it basically boils down to: art [of all kinds] is tricky and takes a lot of practice.
The "what is worth expressing" is where creativity happens. Technique makes you a competent hack. It's not enough for originality. So it's misleading to think it's all art. Technique and originality are different skills. The best artists have lots of both, but they're not related skills.
Thank you for linking to that gallery! It's very eye-opening. I dutifully went through several pages, trying to find something non-boring, and it was indeed all boring (with the exception of Bruegel, who shouldn't be in there).
Interestingly, I feel the same way about many works on ArtStation [1]. The artists try to draw something "cool", like a fantasy creature, but end up with just a basic picture of a human with lots of greebles [2]. Lack of imagination is very obvious.
At the other end of the spectrum for me is something like Wayne Barlowe's "Wargate" [3], an image with a whole new visual language for what it's trying to say, or Paul Veer's pixel art for Nuclear Throne [4], with very simple technique but very imaginative character designs. Apologies if my taste is pedestrian :-)
Interesting litmus test indeed! Some were boring to me, some really interesting -- Monet's painting of a winter day on that page arrested me (and I didn't even identify it as Monet right away) because the way the light came down and reflected off the snow and the clouds was just... amazing. So few artists paint light well. And I noticed myself drawn over and over again to the featured paintings of Galien-Laloue. I like the light again. Bierstadt's paintings are always a little over-the-top but if you can get really close to an original the details are amazing and make you wonder about the time and the tiny people. The paintings of architecture do rather bore me.
My criterion for whether something is art is whether it changes how I see the world. I guess something like Wayne Barlowe's "Wargate" (referenced in a sibling post) doesn't change how I see the world. It's too far removed from my life. But the light in Monet's winter day...
Ok, I'll bite. I found these fascinating. You could live in every one of them, it feels like I'm transported to different times and places, wondering what these people are up to, what's going on, enjoying the sunshine / snow / rain / rough seas. In a word, interesting.
The divided opinions on this gallery are revealing. I can see why someone would find these works excruciatingly boring, in that they are all essentially photographs with no variety in artist's intent or 'method of art' for lack of a better term. But looking at them less abstractly, there is a rich variety of scenes depicted which are skilfully created enough to merit closer observation. I think the parent discovered a really useful litmus test for how someone approaches art.
A counter-argument would be that you don't need to have good handwriting to be an effective writer, and you don't need to have good draftsmanship to be an effective artist. "If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing".
See the highly popular /u/Shitty_Watercolour on Reddit or "Get Your War On" comics by Rees, David.
Practicing technique can be nice, but it can also hinder spontaneity and creativity.
The magical inspiration in art is something beyond technique. The way you practice that is to just live your life.
Lots of people hold themselves back from drawing, dancing, and singing because they are afraid of being judged for not having enough technical skill.
if you never leave the world of the abstract- sure, i can see how you would disagree. but everyone i know who is a good artist knows that craft facilitates art, and they all bust their ass on craft.
I think that living a humble life doing simple things that don't necessarily lead to professional success, is still a very noble lifestyle. The pressure society has brought upon us to follow our dreams, simply because it's nice to follow your dreams, is a bit of a pipe dream.
What I'm trying to say is that success isn't objective, it cannot be measured with the amounts of projects you've built, or with the amounts of professional artworks you've produced. Success is being happy about the simple things in life, whether these are output of your work (art, code, music, etc.) or experiences you've had in life.