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Text by Justin Rigamonti
The obsolete definition of success is “outcome” – curiously replaced by our current connotation: “the achievement of wealth or fame.” These days if you are successful, you are kicking the world’s ass and getting noticed for it. To be successful means to be making heads turn, to be pulling in fistfuls of cash. Etymologically speaking this is unfortunate, since success derives from “succeed”, as in the succession of events –
one thing following after another. To have a success in this sense would be to have events follow one another in the way you hoped they would, resulting in an end situation or product which you intended, expected, hoped for.
Are you looking to be the next hot shit? I suggest hollywood. If you are looking to know what it means to be human in an organic and changing world, to begin to understand this time we have been given of talking, building, and eating, all leading up to death… make art.
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The problem with success as we now define it is that it misdirects the mind away from what matters. If you are trying to be successful, in the tricked-out twentyfirst century sense, you are going to lose. Meaning what?
Look – if you are trying to achieve notoriety and the wealth that follows in its footsteps (which I think is a fair assessment of today’s definition of success), you are going to begin to realize that there are certain things you can make, certain ways of acting, that will achieve this. Madonna dressed up like a prostitute and sang like a siren and made a millions dollars doing it, and ever since we’ve had a series of young girls doing the same thing. It’s called mannerism. A celebrity will do some new bootyshaking and get America’s attention, or an artist will produce a piece of art that is recognized as compelling or beautiful and will be lauded for it, and soon every capital-savy shmoe will be making their own little rip-off versions, be bootyshaking in the same exact way. Why? Because it works. It makes a success, in the contemporary sense.
And if you are thinking that you want to achieve this fame and fortune, I’ll pretty much guarantee you that little copycat habits are going to start infiltrating your work – you’ll put the daub of paint like so, because you know that’s how they are doing it these days and people are eating it up.
Bowing to the machine just to be successful will make you forget about your craft – you’ll forget about making art. You’ll forget that making art is a thing that has to do with you, the people around you, ideas, and being alive in the world.
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Desire for success betrays bad motivations. You might argue that you mean success in the classic sense – that you want to make art because you love making art, and you want to make lots of art that is satisfying to you and those around you. But rarely will you hear someone describe what they mean by desire for success without adding “But I think its okay to want a little fame and fortune.”
Yes, it’s okay to be motivated by greed, but insofar as you are wanting fame and fortune you are not wanting to make art. Even if you are telling yourself that you just want to get enough notoriety to feel good, and enough wealth to live comfortably, you have begun to use art-making itself as a tool for your success. In that sense, art-making isn’t the end product anymore – success is. Are we all so damn blind that we’ve swallowed this vain materialistic dream of renown and wealth, of comfort and peace through money and fame, and given up entirely the goodnessess of art-making: making it for its beauty, making it for its ability to communicate ideas, making it for its profound impact on our lives and the lives of those around us?
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Those who want success in the fame-n-fortune sense should take a moment to reckon with death. We are going to die. All the praise and petting we desire so much out of fear - all the power and wealth we desire, because we want so much that kind of security- all of it will be gone.
Write or paint to be successful, try to be successful in above sense in the arts, and you lose in three ways:
1. You forget about death, and therefore the goodness of life before it – and the best thing it consists of: that is love.
2. You lose yourself - to be successful, you must aim your rhetoric always toward some target, and in as much as you do this, you are aiming it away from an honest growth and expression of the person God has made you to be.
3. You’re art itself gets put on a back burner.
I agree that one could say a symptom of "success" is “going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”, but this implies that success is something, that it is a happiness that is not attached to the product: either praise or perception on others part, but not on the goodness of the work, the excitement of it. Life. If you are bouncing through the failures this way, guess what – you are likely not thinking about them. You are likely thinking about your art, your craft, the thing you do.
Success is hunger's vain dream: a dream of freedom from fear. We will always be hungry until we have "learned the secret to being content in all things". Which is what?
That we do not have to be afraid. That God has made us, flesh and bone, and loves us. That we can love him, and love those around us. That we can open ourselves slowly, over this life, to one another and to him, and to ourselves, to show the beauty of what he has made.
Success is freedom from success.
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Text by Laurel Dailey
Los Angeles is full of wanderers.
And it's no wonder, when the latent threat of the apocalypse shimmers and vibrates off the skyline, sending smoke signals of impending doom into the smoggy ether. Who would put down roots in a city whose own infrastructure can only penetrate so far as our rickety aqueducts will allow?
When I drive through the intersection where Santa Monica and Wilshire meet, it's as though I am vacillating between the great Once-Was and the Never-Again. Here, time has nearly halted and the maudlin, scotch-tinted brutality of the 60's will always be preserved. It's so soft around the edges, this mentality: at once blandly optimistic and acutely paranoid.
What exists here hovers invisibly over the manicured landscape like remnants of a nuclear fallout: Idealism about the future and its sterile, sparkling possibilities buttressed by the quiet terror that the best of times have long since detonated. What remains are the toxic permutations of change that implode and turn in on themselves with precise regularity.
We are the scattered multitudes, the Transient Generation, bumbling mawkishly through the fleeting zeitgeist of our twenties. Ours is a life spent navigating the pitfalls of a new kind of notoriety. Eyes downcast, we splay our lives onto the internet, acting as the liaison between our private self and our public self.
In the efforts to establish roots amidst a transitory world at odds with itself, we’ve chosen to plant our proverbial white picket fence on the internet. Beneath the looping festoon of upspeak and shorthand, banal anecdotes mingle with personal confessions, begetting an eternal adolescence no less callow or miserably powerless than the diary entries we burned along with our youthful vulnerability way back in ‘95.
The online personas of our age are rendered indistinguishable by the symbiotic partnership between unsolicited honesty and shrewd guardedness. Success and failure are only relative to the amount of bandwidth we assign to them. The fickle nature of celebrity and the public persona are reminders that it all looks the same when written in HTML.
In this brave new world of profound sameness, all things are disproportionately brighter, louder, faster--until all else fades and even manic screams and shouts are merely muffled threads in the aural and visual fabric of our age. Each and every event is chronicled with the same marketing strategy, the same deafening roar, the same zing-bam! immediacy of the one preceding it. Our history has lacked depth since the Gulf War, and now our personal narratives have flatlined as well. We are free to choose from a vending machine of smartly packaged events, able to build with the spare change of the information age the precise historical meal that fits into our flimsy diet.
If the generation before us was a generation of slackers, we are a generation of snackers.
Today I find myself in Los Angeles, braided into the endless plait of taillights. There is a lull in the start-stop pattern of traffic, the pace now humming along at a yawny 50 mph. It is dusk. Cars hemorrhage into the asphalt, and buildings melt into the ground. To the west, the sun’s giant bloody iris drips onto the skyline, its poisonous red glare softening a bit around the edges enough for me to see regret in its face. Here, away from the internet, where success and failure are at war with one another--and not unlikely bedfellows--I hear the sun say
This is the last sunset in the loving arms of the apocalypse and instead of an explosion, I gathered my strength and heaved a giant sigh.
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