The most essential art is the art we live with.
I’ve spent most of my life believing that the most valuable art in the world lives in museums.
On the surface, this isn’t a bad thing. I grew up going to museums, and I grew up with the understanding that art is valuable and worthy of spending your time on. (Both as an artist and as a viewer.) This puts me lightyears ahead of many of my fellow artists and makers who didn’t grow up in an art-supportive environment.
But as a working artist, it still has given me some seeds of doubt. Going to art museums as a kid and attending art school for seven years, it’s pretty easy to take in the message that the pinnacle of any artist’s career is having work in museums. (Followed closely by showing your work in exclusive and prestigious galleries.)
That’s the goal, it seems. To make museum-worthy work. Anything else just isn’t as acceptable. Or valuable.
If you are willing to set aside that fact that museums are deeply problematic institutions filled with stolen artifacts (I mean seriously, the British Museum should really be called The Museum of Stuff Britain Stole from Other Countries, and it’s not the only museum that needs to reckon with that legacy), there is something alluring about trying to make work that might someday end up in a museum.
Despite living at least a 40 minute drive from the closest museum, and several hours away from the closest major museum, museums play a huge role in my life. Any time I travel, I make sure to hit up at least a museum or two, and I’ll often go to New York for the day just to see a show at a museum that’s piqued my interest.
Even with all their flaws, museums are one of my happy places, and I frequent them as often as possible.
That is, until the pandemic hit and closed every major museum in the world for months on end.
Suddenly, the only art I could experience was the art in my home and studio. And that’s when it hit me.
The art that has the potential to have the biggest impact on us isn’t the art that’s hanging in a museum. It’s the art we live with in our every day lives.
It’s the handmade mug I drink my tea in every morning or my water throughout throughout the day. It’s the art hanging on my walls, some made by me, and some made by other artists I’ve met over the years. It’s the jewelry hanging from my neck and encircling my fingers.
As an artist and maker who made the decision to make a living from my work, I’ve had to grapple over and over again with the idea that in order to sell my work to a large enough audience to be sustainable, I’m likely never going to make the kind of jewelry that’s going to land me in a museum.
And I will admit that there have been some days where I feel a pang of disappointment over this realization.
But not anymore.
Because I’ve now realized the power that comes when someone chooses to live with your art. The feeling that comes from choosing to experience a piece of art over and over again in your every day life.
Sure, I’ve had powerful experiences looking at art in museums.
But that’s a small part of my life compared to the time I spend in my home and studio every day.
I may have spent ten minutes experiencing Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but I get to spend a lifetime experiencing the art that I own. Which is more likely to shape my life?
Plus, you don’t get to touch The Last Supper.
This is even more true in light of the current pandemic, where travel and museums are off the table.
And yet somehow, most people still miss this point. A recent survey out of Singapore asked respondents to identify the most essential and non-essential jobs during the pandemic. And Artist came back as the number one non-essential job.
Which just goes to show how what artists really do, and the impact they have, is so far removed from most people’s definition of Artist.
We don’t view artists as essential because we’ve divorced art from everyday life. If you consider art as something only made for museums and white cube galleries, of course it would seem non-essential in a world where we can’t leave our houses and those places are closed.
But if you understand all the ways art can and does touch us in our everyday lives, then you start to realize that art is one of the things that can keep us sane right now.
Maybe we should assume that none of the people who said artists weren’t essential have art on their walls. I’m guessing they haven’t sent anyone a card, or put together a puzzle, or sat down to read a picture book with the children in their life. I’m guessing they don’t drink their tea from handmade pottery or wear things that have been crafted by a human.
Maybe those same people haven’t been watching movies or reading books or listening to music either.
Maybe they live their lives in sad little cubes with bare walls and no joy.
But somehow, I doubt that. Instead, I think it’s more likely that they don’t think about those things as art. Or recognize that artists are the ones who created them.
They’ve fallen into the trap of believing that an artist is someone who makes elite work for elite galleries that maybe someday ends up in a museum to be looked at occasionally by the masses.
There are a lot of reasons for this. The art world is built on hierarchy. It’s built to make you believe that the greatest goal of all art is to end up in a museum. And the art world has been historically hostile to art that’s created outside that goal – art that’s created for people to live with.
It’s worth noting that the art that’s created to be part of every day life has often been created by women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), all of which the art world has historically sought to disenfranchise. (And often continues to do so to this day.)
And when art that’s meant for every day life does make it into museums, it’s often done so by erasing the identity of the creator. (For more on that, see this post by Anisa Tavanger on Instagram and read her thesis here.)
That’s why people think artists aren’t essential. Because so many of the artists who make work for every day life have been erased. They’ve been devalued.
But I’m ready to change that.
I want to help people see the value in the art we live with every day. (And the value of the artists who create that work.) And who better to do that than you and I, the people who make art to be used, experienced, and loved in people’s every day lives.
So what does that look like?
It means we stop holding up museums as the number one goal for a piece of art. We take a lesson from Toy Story 2, which taught us that a toy’s greatest purpose was not to end up in a museum, but to live with and be loved by a child.
We should start thinking of our art in the same way. The goal isn’t to get into a museum or even a prestigious gallery, but to find the people who will love, treasure, and experience our work in every day life.
It means we stop devaluing our art (and the art of others) if museums and galleries were never the goal in the first place. We celebrate the artists (ourselves included) who choose to make work that is “sellable,” because it’s the sellable work that finds its way into people’s everyday lives.
And it means we learn to talk about and sell our work in a way that celebrates people’s experience of it. It means we start showing the joy and meaning and connection and emotion that comes with living with art in all its forms.
Because if we, the makers of art that enhances people’s lives every day, can’t articulate the value of what we do, how can we expect anyone else to get it?
And that value doesn’t come because someone decided to put our work in a museum or gallery. It comes in the form of the joy and meaning and emotion and connection and experience we bring to people’s lives every day. And that is essential.
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If you need help articulating the value of your work, I invite you to check out my class Sell Without Shame. Because it’s time artists and makers started recognizing and sharing the value in what they do!