I went to see a film about Damien Hirst last night. Between interviews with Melvyn Bragg (host of the often-stimulating In Our Time radio show/podcast) the film showed Hirst at work: setting up a show of pieces from his collection at the Serpentine gallery, explaining his vision for Toddington Manor, and directing staff at several of his Factory-ish studios. Jeff Koons also weighed in from one of his own toy factories, his elves buzzing around in the background.
Seeing Hirst and Koons in those contexts got me thinking back to an interview I heard with Philip Glass in the mid-nineties. I don’t remember all the details, but the general gist was that he had a few dozen employees working under him, and once you are the captain of such a ship, going back to a rowboat means tossing all those people overboard.
The moral obligation he felt to keep the organization afloat seemed like it could take precedent over any particular artistic directions he might have wanted to explore. Big ships have great difficulty navigating narrow channels, shallow bays or uncharted backwaters.
There is much to admire about this model: An artist reaches a point in their career in which they are able to support nascent and emerging artists, to provide apprenticeship opportunities for the next generation.
And such an enterprise not only supports the direct employees, it can become a cultural cornerstone, with enthusiastic fans and customers that desire and expect some level of stability and regularity in the results. In that way, it’s not so different from a story I heard this morning about Duarte’s Tavern, a multi-generational family restaurant in Pescadero, California.
But it’s important to remember how limiting a situation like that can become. I’ve always found the early works of Philip Glass the most engaging — the clarity of “Contrary Motion” and “Two Pages” much more compelling than his symphonic works, “Einstein on the Beach” so vastly superior to his later operas.
What if Glass woke up one morning and had a vision of a multi-year cycle of woodwind quartet pieces? One that could be his greatest artistic achievement, but that would only support a staff of two or three?
And what if the members of the fifth generation of the Duartes aspire to be archaeologists or geneticists rather than make asparagus soup? Do their obligations to family and the expectations of the restaurant’s customers outweigh such ambitions? After all, it’s probably the restaurant that’s putting them through college.
Of course, in our creative endeavours, not all of us are dealing with the pressures of meeting a payroll for dozens of people or keeping a business thriving well into its second century.
But what obligations — explicit or implicit — have we wandered into that limit our creative options? Are these obligations having a positive impact? Are they forcing us to be more creative? Or do they subconsciously constrict our choices and warp the creative decisions we make in undesirable ways?
Such challenges are not peculiar to multi-million dollar enterprises or 115-year old restaurants. In a letter from Robert Rich I pointed to on the scrapbook last week, he describes one of the snares that even modest success presents:
A further caveat: it’s easy to get trapped into the expectations of these True Fans, and with such a tenuous income stream, an artist risks poverty by pushing too far beyond the boundaries of style or preconceptions. I suppose I have a bit of a reputation for being one of those divergent – perhaps unpredictable – artists, and from that perspective I see a bit of a Catch 22 between ignoring those expectations or pandering to them. If we play to the same 1000 people, and keep doing the same basic thing, eventually the Fans become sated and don’t feel a need to purchase this year’s model, when it’s almost identical to last year’s but in a slightly different shade of black. Yet when the Fans’ Favorite Artist starts pushing past the comfort zone of what made them True Fans to begin with, they are just as likely to move their attention onwards within the box that makes them comfortable. Damned if you do or don’t.
These are the kind of creative balances we must each strike for ourselves. I’m not suggesting that any set of choices is better than the other, just that we should make such choices deliberately, and approach the challenges of tradition, obligation, expectation and even appreciation with the same kind of creativity we bring to the work itself.
