G. Steve Journal

Exception to the Standard

Just wanted to share a spot-on excerpt from todays blog post by marketing guru Seth Godin.  As usual, he's made the distinction between what we may tell ourselves (as artists or otherwise) and what it is we really need to keep in mind:

The other day, after a talk to some graduate students at the Julliard School, one asked, "In The Dip, you talk about the advantage of mastery vs. being a mediocre jack of all trades. So does it make sense for me to continue focusing on mastering the violin?"

Without fear of error, I think it's easy to say that this woman will never become the best violinist in the world. That's because it's essentially impossible to be the one and only best violinist in the world. There might be 5,000 or 10,000 people who are so technically good at it as to be indistinguishable to all but a handful of orchestra listeners. This is true for many competitive fields--we might want to fool ourselves into thinking that we have become the one and only best at a technical skill, but it's extremely unlikely.

The quest for technical best is a form of hiding. You can hide from the marketplace because you're still practicing your technique. And you can hide from the hard work of real art and real connection because you decide that success lies in being the best technically, at getting a 99 instead of a 98 on an exam.

What we can become the best at is being an idiosyncratic exception to the standard. Joshua Bell is often mentioned (when violinists are mentioned at all) not because he is technically better than every other violinst, but because of his charisma and willingness to cross categories. He's the best in the world at being Josh Bell, not the best in the world at playing the violin.

Kim Jong Phil!

Just came across this whimsical but spot-on musings of artist Phil Toledano:

For years now, I’ve been thinking (on a Woody Allen level of obsession) what it means to be an artist.

I reflect on the elaborate psychological mechanisms required to pursue something so elusive, so ambiguous. I alternate between wild confidence, sure and definite in my belief that i’m onto something, and wild despair. My ideas are shit. They’re relevant to no-one but myself. I often wonder: ‘Am I talking to myself?’

I’ve never made work for other people. But as an artist, I need to be in dialogue with the world that exists beyond my overpopulated cranium.

I’ve concluded that to be effective-to be functional-I must guzzle an eye-popping cocktail of delusion and narcissism.

It occurred to me that being an artist is a great deal like being a dictator.

Just like a dictator, I must live in a closed loop of self-delusion. A place where my words and ideas always ring true. A gilded daydream of grandiosity. There can be no room for doubt. I must be convinced that I have something vital to say. I must believe that the world is waiting in keen anticipation to hear my message.

For my palette, I’ve copied pre-existing dictatorial art. Paintings from North Korea, statues of assorted dictators (Kim Il Sung, Laurent Kabilla, and Saddam Hussein). I had these works re-created in China, and each instance, I’ve replaced the great leaders with myself.

Magical Thing

I can't say I'm a big Tom Waits fan - it seems to me to be an acquired taste - but it's hard not to respect him and the path he's on.  Like that line from The Band song "Cripple Creek:" "I can't stand the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk."

Well, Waits did talk at length with Terry Gross on an episode of Fresh Air and I thought his musings on songwriting could be applied to any creative endeavor -- just insert the name of the medium, say photography instead of songwriting -- and change a few details and, voila, same deal:

"For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too," he says. "And you just do it by picking up the needle and putting it back down and figuring it how these people did this magical thing. It's rather mystifying when you think about songs — where they come from and how they're born. Many times, it's very humble and very mundane, the origin of these songs."