Who Would be an Artist?

The Diary of an Art Advisor

Over the past year or so, this newsletter has discussed, amongst other things, new exhibitions, the art market and bad actors, how to collect and what to look out for, and the quiet persistence of painting. But this week, I’ve turned the focus inward – not just toward the work itself, but toward the people who make it.

What does it mean to choose a life structured around making art – especially now, when the world feels increasingly brittle and uncertain? What kind of temperament does that require? And what are the costs – not just for artists, but for the people who orbit them?

This isn’t a romantic take, and it’s not a lament, it’s a quiet reckoning with what’s involved – psychologically, emotionally, practically – in committing to a life of sustained creative attention.

There’s something inherently odd about choosing to be an artist. Not just because it’s precarious – though it is – but because it requires a level of absorption that can make you fundamentally out of sync with the world around you.

It’s not so much that being an artist is selfish, exactly, but it is self-centred in the literal sense. You’re always orbiting your own thoughts. Always processing. Always watching for meaning, connections, visual structure, thematic resonance. Always thinking about the work – about what it needs, what’s unresolved, what’s next. That intensity can look like withdrawal from the outside. And in a way, it is. The world narrows to the shape of a problem you’re trying to solve through paint, through clay, through writing, or gesture, or material. It’s not an avoidance of life, but it’s definitely a reframing of it – structured through the act of making.

What’s peculiar is how normal that starts to feel. You get used to thinking about your time, your space, your resources, your energy in relation to your work. And that’s where the tension lies. If you live with an artist, or are related to one, you’re living with someone who may be physically present, but is often elsewhere mentally. Preoccupied. Staring out of a window not in thought, but in the middle of something.

Is that selfish? Maybe. Certainly, it’s difficult to live with. But it’s not about arrogance or ego – it’s just that making work takes up a lot of bandwidth. Even when you’re not in the studio or the project or the piece, you’re in it. Because artists don’t just make things. They interpret and filter. They construct. Making is a way of understanding the world and the medium is only half of it. The point is the thinking behind the making – the need to say something, or to find the right form to ask a question that’s been bothering you for years.

So who chooses to be an artist? What kind of person signs up for this? You might assume that it's people who were good at drawing at school, or had something to prove, but more accurately, it's likely to be people who "live in their heads". The kind of person who’s always a little off to one side of things - not quite in the middle of the group... people for whom observation is a form of participation.

And that’s the problem: making art demands immersion – and immersion, by its nature, means stepping back from other things. Artists often make poor participants in the more conventional rhythms of life. It’s not deliberate, and it’s not hostile. But it happens. Being an artist is a way of opting out of a lot of the frameworks that structure other professions – there’s no promotion ladder, no fixed salary, no water cooler culture. That has its freedoms, but it also has consequences, particularly for those who share their lives with artists. Especially now, because we’re not in a moment of cultural buoyancy.

If anything, the conditions are getting tougher. The cost of living is rising, economies are fragile, state support for the arts is eroding, and discretionary income is drying up. The idea of being an artist – already a fragile proposition – is becoming even less viable in conventional economic terms. So what happens to people who’ve built their lives around this kind of work? What happens to the families around them, who are carrying the weight of that instability?

And more broadly – what use are artists in times like these? If artists are not offering essential services or measurable outputs, what is their role? What do they actually contribute?

The answer isn’t easy to quantify. But it has something to do with attention. With pattern recognition. With holding contradictory thoughts in tension. Artists are among the few who make it their business to think deeply and visually, emotionally, structurally, about the world we’re living in – and to translate those thoughts into something physical, something others can look at or listen to or sit inside of. It’s not about answers. It’s not even necessarily about truth. But it is about perspective – about offering new ways to look at something familiar, or familiar ways to look at something new.

And that’s the thing that gets missed in conversations about ‘usefulness’. Artists do the slow, difficult, interpretive work of sense-making. Not always consciously, and not always effectively, but that’s the impulse – to take the incoherence of the world and try to give it shape. And at a time when everything feels unstructured, collapsing or stuck, that’s not a luxury. That’s a necessity.

So maybe it’s not about what artists are for. Maybe it’s about what they do. They insist on paying attention. They resist simplification. They find form for difficult thoughts. They create space where contradiction, ambiguity and beauty can coexist. At every level of our lives, that is an essential perspective.

That’s not to say artists have all the answers – they don’t (certainly not in their own lives), but they do offer a way of staying with the questions. In a time that prizes speed and certainty, that in itself is a kind of resistance. And maybe that’s the real value here: not to solve, or to soothe, but to hold a mirror to the complexity of things – to reflect back the absurdity.

Greg Rook

Blackbird Rook

If you’re curious about collecting art, I’d love to hear from you.

Get in touch: www.blackbirdrook.com

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