"Can anyone be an artist?"
or: Does it matter if you're good at your job any more?
Dispatches from SXSW, part 2.
Buried in the middle of a tragically underwhelming discussion on creativity, Jeremy Deller was asked a question which - the more I reflect on it - might be the central question of our time: “Can anyone be an artist?”
“No”, was his immediate reply. To paraphrase his supporting argument: anybody can pick up a paintbrush, but artists make more than pictures, they create meaning, and elicit thoughts and feelings from an audience.
Later on in the conference I got talking to someone who introduced herself as a “pre-seed founder”, which upon further interrogation meant she’d done a bit of extra-curricular coding and made an app which nobody had used yet.
I absolutely applaud and envy her confidence and ambition, and am going to attempt to channel a bit of it, but to me it felt like perhaps she would have totally disagreed with Jeremy Deller, and maybe a fair chunk of the advertising industry would too. Access to tools and production capability means anyone can turn thought into action now, so there’s nothing stopping anyone creating anything.
These points of view represent two opposing visions of the future of our industry, and which of them becomes reality depends on the answer to a question I’ve been wrestling with in a few different guises when thinking/panicking about the/my future:
What’s the value of being good any more?
Of being an expert?
Of having good taste?
If technology, testing and maths allow anyone to whack out something serviceable in next to no time and at next to no cost, then the marginal impact of those things has to be pretty significant to justify the cost.
A lot of large businesses use advertising primarily to defend their market share. For them I think there’s a decent argument that ‘good enough’ is the sensible choice. It’s just advertising after all, just selling stuff, there’s no depth or profundity required; get something 5/10 out there, slap a logo on it, make sure it shows up in the background of people’s lives reasonably often.
But any advertiser that wants to do more than just defend their market share still needs to create meaning or get noticed rather than just remind people that they exist. The need to elicit a thought or a feeling from a real person remains, and I think people are smarter, and better at sniffing out lazy rubbish, than we give them credit for.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, or copium, but I think that’s still the domain of human beings who know what they’re doing.
It’s Cannes week - all the chat on the boardwalk is going to be about tech and data taking over, but all of the work on display (in the basement, read into that what you will) is all innately human.
The good stuff will be for a while, and I think very few brands can get away without trying to make good stuff, however cheap the alternative is.
As always, I’d love to know what you think, and if you made it this far please share it on.
Greg