'First, you should be clear about what you are aiming for: (1) public approval, (2) commercial success, or (3) art-historical significance. These three are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and there is nothing wrong with any of them. But my remarks address only (3).
The best means to art-historical significance is financial independence. Don’t even think about trying to earn a living from your artwork, or else you’ll start producing the artwork that will earn you a living. A trust fund will divert your energies in a different way. The best means to financial independence is a day job in a different field. Waiting tables, driving a cab, office work, and teaching are traditional alternatives for artists, but the digital revolution opens up many others. All of them will free you to make the work you are most deeply driven to make, regardless of whether or not anyone else likes it or buys it. That’s the work that’s most interesting and important to you.'
Though a lot of this makes sense to me and chimes with my own position, I'm completely foxed by the opening paragraph's three reasons to make art.
From where I sit, 'art-historical significance' as a driver for making art seems like the perfect path to complete self-sabotage.
Firstly, you're likely to take yourself far too seriously. Taking yourself too seriously is going to affect what you make, your relationship to yourself, and your relationship to others.
Secondly, you're removing pretty much all possibility of being free to find out what you actually want to make, because you're involved in a kind of people-pleasing where you're always trying to second-guess yourself from the perspective of a (non-existent) outsider.
Thirdly, because you're always looking backwards or around you, comparing yourself to other people and trying to be different, you're likely to be making it very hard to connect with yourself and the world in the present moment of who you actually are and what actually wants to come. Perhaps you also have to be happy to have no-one engage with your work until after you're dead, which seems like a weird way to live your life.
The possibility of 'art-historical significance' died for me when I first learnt about Malevich's 'white on white', which for some reason I always remembered as 'a white square on a white ground'. I first learnt about this when I was doing an art history A level, and it seemed to me that painting as it had been known in 'Western' cultures completed itself at that moment. People were not going to stop painting, but for me it seemed to me that after that it was very unlikely that anyone was going to be able to paint something that hadn't already been done.
Being ground-breaking and original isn't the only reason to make art, but in Europe and America this idea still has a lot cachet. I don't consciously look for something that's blindingly original, but I do look for something that interests me. And even though there are lots of skillful and interesting paintings around, I don't get excited by them most of the time. I think that I probably make the images that I do just because I want to look at something that's in some way unexpected or ambiguous.
And out in the world beyond the Anglo-Euro-America bubble, all kinds of reasons can be found to make art which are not any of the three things listed in this quote.
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