Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, we turn a ladder on its side.
Ep. 4 Not a Ladder but a Continuum
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, we turn a ladder on its side.
*****
Thanks for listening to Mind Your Practice and be sure to subscribe so you get all the bonus episodes coming your way. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, live QnA's, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. You can find me on Instagram at @bethpickensconsulting. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Mind Your Practice is created by Beth Pickens and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Ep. 4 Not a Ladder but a Continuum
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, we turn a ladder on its side.
*****
Hello artists. We live in a world of hierarchies. Always surveying our positions in the world around us. Where are we, exactly, in relation to everyone else? Our hierarchies have hierarchies. The art world makes hierarchies into, and please excuse me for this, an art form. Artists can feel so beleaguered by real and perceived hierarchies in their respective art worlds, they forget that they have to power, dare I say the mandate, to undermine and explode all such systems of organized or purported power. Especially art world gatekeeping assholes.
But let me be back up, be more tender, less aggressive. I mean this episode to be an opening up, not a shutting down. You, artist, don’t have to be on a ladder. Turn it on its side and it becomes a continuum. You are placed exactly where you are supposed to be here and now. Look one direction and there are other artists who have more than you, they have more of what you want, they are where you hope to move, where you want to be. This extends into infinity. Look the other direction and there are artists who see you as an inspiration, the object of their professional and creative desire, showing them where they hope to go, what they work toward. It also extends into infinity. You are on an endless continuum moving around it throughout your lifetime. It’s not a hierarchy and it never has to be one again.
Of course, the main person for you to compare yourself against is you, where you’ve been. The main person for you to impress, well actually it’s two people. You have to impress yourself at age 17 (good luck) and another you at the end of your life. I know this sounds absurd. You’re comparing yourself to literally every other person you see or imagine, all day every day. I am, too. I’ve got a dumb human brain like you do. But these comparisons to other people are meaningless unless they are motivating, which, in moments, they may be. But comparing your interior to someone’s highly edited and projected upon exterior and that’s just not real and sets you up for self-abandonment.
Back to art world hierarchies. They are real but not true. There are so many rules people will tell you to follow. People try to follow them because they want to be successful and they are afraid. The rules are all invented by extremely wealthy people and enforced by the rest of us, like in every other part of life. Just forget all of the rules and make your work and ask for what you want and contribute to your creative community. Your seventeen year old self would give zero fucks about rules for being an artist, I promise you. Your close to death self would given even fewer fucks. Get off the hierarchies, don’t enforce them, and instead look around you at the expansive continuum. Everyone has something to teach or offer you when you stop comparing and placing them above or below you.
Ok, here’s some homework.
What are the hierarchies you perceive in your chosen art worlds? How do they operate and who is where and how are they enforced? How are you - consciously and unconsciously - enforcing and participating in them? How might you hop off?
Consider yourself on the continuum. Who do you see in one direction? Who has more of what you want and how can you move toward them? Now look the other direction? Who do you imagine wants what you have and how can you help them get it?
Next ask yourself and your dirtbag friends how you can undermine the art world hierarchies bumming you out.
Finally, let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you.
*****
Thanks for listening to Mind Your Practice and be sure to subscribe so you get all the bonus episodes coming your way. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. You can find me on Instagram at @bethpickensconsulting. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Mind Your Practice is created by Beth Pickens and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.