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All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World?
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>I feel like I’m not being humble when I’m saying “I feel like I’m pretty good and skilled.”
In general, if you're an artist, you're a sensitive person. This means you're able to understand emotional nuances & appreciate them in other's art & reflect them in your art.
On the flip side of this, it also means having a strong inner critic who says you're never good enough, your art is terrible, you're a hack, you're an imposter, etc. This isn't the case for everyone, as there are plenty of arrogant jerk artists out there, but a lot of us suffer from that "not good enough" internal feeling.
There are also artists who are proud of their work & simply don't brag about it, as well as artists who are "neutral" because they're focused on growing their skills & knowledge & on putting in the work to complete their works of art. Being an artist is difficult because:
- You DO need to "brag" to a certain extent through marketing, because otherwise your art never gets out there. Art is meant to be seen & appreciated, and if you have a strong inner critic, that creates an internal dichotomy between wanting to be seen, appreciated, and validated, and dealing with those internal feelings of artistic self-worth.
- You need to be able to accept constructive criticism, as well as develop a thick skin against unconstructive, uninvited, insecure, and mean-spirited criticism. I remember the hefty negative feelings sitting on the stool in front of the art class back in high school getting my work & my skills torn apart. Learning how to not take them personally & instead use them as suggestions for improvement is a skill I think every artist needs to learn & MASTER!
- Speaking of being humble, there's a difference between the word "pride" and "proud", as far as intention goes. If you're a prideful person, then you think you're better than everyone else & your work is so great & blah blah blah. If you're proud of your work, then that means you're proud of the skills you've developed & used, the effort & technique that went into creating your art, and of the final output, idea, emotional impact, use of color & beauty & whatever else you baked into the finished product. Which, as emotionally-sensitive people, conflicts with our inner critic!
Keep in mind that these are all compartmentalized, discrete things. You can create amazing, wonderful, beautiful art & not be a cocky jerk. You can create the same thing but also have zero confidence at all. It's really a matter of what you personally struggle with & what you want to achieve, which isn't always clear, because how do you resolve strong negative feelings with positive creative output?
One person who I think has mastered this is Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn & one of my favorite comic book artists. He's confident, he knows what he's doing, he does great work, and as a bonus, he also shares a lot of his stuff online! Check this playlist out:
For a commercially-successful artist who is worth $300 million, he's one of the most down-to-earth, cool, chill people I've ever seen. He loves what he does, loves his work, loves his fans, and stays engaged online on a regular basis. He's living the dream!
On a tangent, one book you may want to check out is "All Marketers are Liars" by Seth Godin. The audiobook version is also really good:
Being able to market your work is a job, not an emotional situation, which is something we as artists tend to conflate, because we feel like we should be humble about our skills & our work, and yet we'd all like to make money off our art & make art our jobs!
Also, in general, a lot of artists don't say they're good at their work because they don't want to come off across as self-important or snotty. It's a balancing act, because you want to be proud of your work without seeming full of yourself lol.
A good way to watch how people deal with this is to go to gallery openings for individual artist exhibits, especially when they present & do an opening speech & whatnot, because then you can see who has an over-inflated ego, who is focused on the work itself & the message of their work, etc.
I don't have any magic answers, other than it's mostly an individual thing, to figure out what you want & what you struggle with, and then find paths forward to achieving the way you want to feel & behave & come across as, as it's not very clear or easy sometimes!
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