Mythologizing

The confronting ‘What do you want to be?’, posed to us in early life, echoes across our lifespan. What begins as a question about our vocational aspirations soon becomes distorted, taking on an existential weight. It plants an unconscious seed — an anxiety of what one ought to be as an adult. As children, we respond to this ‘innocent’ prompt by choosing what’s most salient, which is often what becomes enacted or fantasized in play or modelled by those we aspire to be like. The question about how we might imagine our future position inserts a quiet teleology about our ‘purpose’ and finds itself popularized in culture as: What’s the meaning of life? And while it’s taken on an ironic status amongst Millennials and Gen Z’s, the question still finds its form, albeit repressed and sublimated through career aspirations, romantic relationships, and other narratives of fulfillment. This pressure to ‘be something’ seeps deep enough into ordinary ways of thinking that it risks opening simple creative gestures to evaluation and judgement.

Through schooling or the conditions of the home, we may be encouraged to pick up a pencil or a brush and told to express ourselves. These acts quickly entangle with notions of ‘creativity’ and are evaluated by praise, disapproval, or indifference. Over time, their appraisals lead us to associate these acts of mark-making with the artist, a cultural representation that quietly appropriates exploration and curiosity on the page. With enough internalization, an inner critic emerges and demands we do better or give up entirely. Many of us fall into this trap of over-determining what might otherwise remain an ordinary act of exploration and oppressing ourselves by comparison with the ‘genius’ of the artist. From birth, this ‘person’ is endowed with a gift of knowing, fluency, and self-transparency. Insofar as we think this way, we alienate ourselves beyond the margins of this conception of the ‘genius’ artist. We respond to self-defined notions of failure and success through negotiation and re-negotiation of such terms — inciting a masochistic circling around our identity. This evocation of ‘who is’ and ‘who is not’, elevates the artist status through imagined scarcity and predestination.

Creation ex nihilo — ‘creating out of nothing’ — assumes the originality of the artist as an independent being. It imagines them creating spontaneously without aid, reference, or dependence on predecessors or collaborators — instead, operating alone and citing divine or spiritual intervention, or enshrining their ego as the wellspring of ideas. In the digital world, this narcissistic trope of originality manifests more broadly in ‘celebrity culture’, IYKYK (if you know, you know) influencers, and narratives that grandstand tech-billionaire founders (Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos). Through various forms of media, we can call to mind the hyperboles of the ‘tortured’ artist — the apparent necessity of mild to severe mental illness for creating ‘works of art’ or depictions of substance abuse and alcoholism amongst artist-types framed as ready-states for inspiration — further perpetuates this motivic relationship between deteriorated mental well-being and artistry. From advertising to film, popular media is saturated with these stereotypes, which raises broader concerns — how do we want to think of ourselves, and by extension, others, in a culture that reveres mythologies that confine and overdetermine identities?

The Subject of the Artist

’Thinking through paint’ is the kind of innocuous expression one might hear in an artist talk or interview. It gestures towards what can’t easily be named. And among artists, this idea appears self-evident — painting itself is the ‘thinking’. In the studio, the artist’s engagement with their medium(s) unfolds as a complex, layered process, where embodiment precedes language, where ‘thinking’ occurs without words, and where the terms of one’s practice folds back into the act of creation itself. It’s then no surprise that we reach for these studio-born idioms to capture a part of this private experience.

Julia Kristeva’s semiotic knots this more tightly — that the ‘thinking’ of this kind can situate itself in the body as a felt drive or an undercurrent that expresses itself through language. By contrast, the ‘thought’ in everyday thinking is directed towards particular objects. The artist’s ‘thought’ is located in a kind of flow state, where the subjective experience of “I” recedes. But if the unconscious is that which appears in slips, jokes, or dreams, and the “I” is what appears in self-consciousness, what can we say about who’s doing the ‘thinking’ at this level? Perhaps we already sense that language struggles to translate these experiences into ordinary terms. So, maybe, you just had to be there.

Audiences often make genuine efforts to engage with a given work through feeling, reflection, and analysis. But Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum challenges what it means to come away with a sense of having got it. What feels like comprehension may well be a response to a simulation. Formal considerations like line or shape in a painting can be examined, or an artist’s experiences empathized with, but if our ideas about Art exceed illustration or reproduction, then what does it mean to ‘know’ a work at all? Perhaps the remedy to this impasse is to resist mastery altogether and let the work remain opaque, without demanding resolution.

However, in an attention economy that privileges speed over slow-burning meditations, it’s evident that this productive logic seeps into our after-work lives, turning leisure into labour. It’s no wonder, that some aspect of our relationship to Art too, seeks comparable immediacy — a 2001 study conducted at the MET indicates that the average museum-goer spends around 27 seconds for a given work (consider how much shorter that time might be today). Consumer conveniences like same-day shipping (Amazon) or AI-personalized algorithms (Tiktok, Instagram) quietly displace our patience and tolerance — traits to be kept in check if we want to stay vigilant against the creeping expectation for faster returns on our attention. In practice, the anxieties and apathies found in the art-viewing experience seem to relate in part to their legibility and relatability. Even the opacity, and at times, outright obfuscation of gallery wall texts, further amplifies our desire for clarity. Yet the artist who refuses explanation, risks leaving the viewer without much scaffolding, inviting the same charges of mysticism they sought to resist.

Speaking about one’s own work is like creating a scene in a film: show, don’t tell. The audience doesn’t need to be spoon-fed, but inspired to imagine and interpret in the spaces our speech leaves open. To quote Edward Hopper, ‘If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’