Worship False Idols or Make Great Art: How Do You Define Success?

What advice would you give to the current generation of aspiring artists?

My only advice is to spend less time on thinking about success and put all the energy in making art itself. Otherwise your relationship to your art changes. It becomes less genuine and honest. Art should not be born from pressure of becoming successful but something deeper. This is always a danger and the cause for mediocrity in art. If a great idea or art is born, everyone will come to it sooner or later. This is a fact.

--Shirin Neshat, interviewed in Linda Weintraub's In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art, 2004, pp. 214-221.

Did you sell anything at that show?

No. My shows have never been about selling art. My interest and concern is in the creation of meaning. I am not really concerned with the free market or the fashion of the day. One of the questions is: is it possible to create work that is effective, complex, and deeply visual and to remain in a mode of experimentation using simultaneity, multiplicity, proximity, and agency as active ingredients to produce art?

--Daniel Joseph Martinez, Ibid. pp. 374-383.

I've always felt that the most important thing for an artist to do is to find some way to make a living that has nothing to do with their work, and to be happy with that, and to keep the financial burden off of their artwork . . .

So you don't think that that is a distraction from your artwork?

Well, it might be a distraction, but it's completely unrealistic for anyone to graduate from art school and think that they're going to make a living off their work [laughs]. That's a fantasy a lot of people have. But if somebody can be happy in their life and be making work, they have to understand that that's success . . . But the important thing is to keep it together for the long term and to believe that if you're able to do something interesting, people will eventually pay attention to it. That I firmly believe. But whether you're going to make money off it, or not, that is a different story. The art world is not a meritocracy. . .

Well, it seems like we're having a crisis of identity. Right now for us, it's money, you know? That's what has become the new code. But that's probably inherently unhealthy as well.

You put you're finger on it. Because if the measure of success is money, you have a built-in conflicted situation where people are going to be unhappy. I think it's important for people to understand that the way the art system is set up, you're always waiting to be validated from the outside. The biggest struggle in the arts is to realize that you have to validate yourself from the inside. You're going to be set up for disappointment and failure if you believe that the only way to be a success is to be validated from the outside, because you can't control that. There's no way to control the reaction you're going to get from the world.

--Tony Oursler, Ibid. pp. 304-313. (my bolds).