Penny Arcade's Letter to Young Artists

Sometimes all you need to center yourself is a little chat with the incredible Penny Arcade. Lucky for us, she's just penned a "Letter to a Young Artist." As more and more poetry places performance and sociality on valuable feet, a lot of this piece resonates:

The artist Jack Smith once said "Art is more like farming than like manufacturing." Filmmaker Jonas Mekas said “My job is like the job of a farmer, to plant the seed and protect the little sprout. To allow it to grow to fruition in it’s [sic] own time." I have seen many talented people who received early recognition founder as they reached 40, lacking the inner development to carry on. Today’s downtown performance world operates very much on a basis of popularity rather than on ability. It is very easy to feel like you are succeeding with your work when what is actually happening is that you are succeeding socially.

Later:

If one's life between 18 and 35 is only grounded in the desire for achievement and recognition without any concept of development or rigorous inquiry, the possibility for continued development as an artist is severely compromised. The first generations of “academic artists” hit NY in the late 70′s to late 1980’s. I can tell you that very, very few of those artists were still making work in the late 1990’s and even among the successful ones, only a small handful are still making art today. Why? Because it is very hard to sustain any kind of real personal dialogue with art, if you come out of school and start making your own work right away. There is no period of failure. No striving to develop the true inner dialogue on which art is based. What one ends up dialoguing with is success and recognition. The all important period of developing your own vocabulary which is best done in the shadows is truncated, starved. Instead what one sees are people copying what seems to work for other artists and this is a betrayal to ones own budding vision, which cannot be rushed to fulfill some ego based need for recognition. There are many of examples of people who got that recognition early, shows, tours and grants from age 26 on who are empty and artistically exhausted by age 39, just at the moment that ones own vocabulary starts to naturally coalesce. In my early 40’s my personal vision was just starting to assert itself in an integrated way. There were younger artists 10-15 years younger than myself, who were frustrated by my lack of critical success and they had no problem telling me that to my face. At the time I had been running my sex and censorship show, a blend of political humanism and erotic dance “Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! for a year off Broadway. . . .

Read it all at Penny's website. Photograph by Ruth Fremson for The New York Times.