Hi,
This is part three of the Dark Side of Creativity. You can read the first two parts at Everyone's Creative.
Why do we gatekeep creativity?
I'm pretty up front with my belief that creativity is important but that it's ultimately nothing special. That is to say, it's not unique or something that anyone should feel they have a monopoly over. That's because Everyone's Creative. It's just one of the ways humans are.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'm in the majority with this opinion (hence, this whole endeavour) and nowhere is this more evident than with Creative Gatekeeping. This is the practice of trying to put walls up around creativity and establish some sort of restriction on who gets to be thought of as creative. It's something I dip into when I talk about demystifying the process, but it's deeper than just obscuring the way you work or pretending that you have some special skill that others don't. Creative gatekeeping is darker than that, because it's a more active attack on other people's creativity in an attempt to keep them from expressing themselves.
The irony is that Creative Gatekeepers see themselves as protectors of creativity, when they're more likely to do harm to creativity as a whole than anyone else.
Why Artists are the Worst Gatekeepers
I've talked before about how artists (especially professional artists) have a deep scarcity complex. Art is increasingly undervalued, and so those of us who create art for a living are feeling a growing pressure to validate and justify our work in order to survive.
One of the ways you can make your work seem important is to demonstrate that importance. But that's hard to do with art. You need to make the art, build an audience and have your work connect with people who then become supporters, patrons and champions of what you do. It takes time and success isn't guaranteed. All the while, you're investing money, energy and emotion into something with no guarantee that you'll see anything for it.
What if there was a easier way? What if you could just tell people that your work is important? That's the core idea behind the Creative Gatekeeper's mindset: it's a commandment stating that the Gatekeeper understands something that others don't, and that their authority is what justifies the value they proclaim. It's a circular argument, but for some people it works. People buy it. It starts to reinforce itself. But it isn't sustainable.
Artists become gatekeepers to justify their existence. Just like how a corporation may buy out all their competitors so they can restrict the supply of their product and artificially increase prices, gatekeepers want to restrict the supply of artists to increase demand for their own work. It makes sense, in some twisted way, especially if you do believe everyone's creative. If everyone could do what you do, then why would anyone pay you to do it? Why would anyone value your work over someone else's?
That insecurity and scarcity mindset is where so much gatekeeping comes from. It's an attempt to control the perceived value of creative work by constraining what qualifies as sanctioned creativity to begin with. But more often than not it becomes the cause of increased resentment that chips away at the perceived value of creativity at a deeper cultural level.
The Dark Prince of Creative Gatekeeping
Meet Anish Kapoor. He's the Bean Man. The man who made the big shiny bean in Chicago (and the smaller, but equally shiny bean in New York). Kapoor is an internationally acclaimed fine artist who has received the opportunity to work on many extremely high-profile (and high-value) projects which in turn, increase his profile (and his net-worth). Kapoor is also the dark prince of Creative Gatekeeping.
Most famously, Anish Kapoor acquired an exclusive license to Vanta Black (the blackest black). It was an absurd idea to think that one artist could somehow be the only person allowed to use a colour, not because they were the only person skilled enough to mix it, or the only person who could paint in a particular way to make us see it, but because it would be against the law for anyone else to do it. Kapoor used the very heavy-handed barrier of actual legal exclusivity rights to establish a boundary between who could and couldn't use a certain material.
Taking this to a logical extreme, Kapoor might envision a world where he should be the only person allowed to work with clay or the only person allowed to draw on paper. In this world, the definition of a drawing or a sculpture isn't something created by an artist to express something, but something created by Anish Kapoor, full stop. This kind of approach to gatekeeping is very helpful for us, because it's so insane and so extreme that we can't help but see the evidence of the insecurity and the scarcity mindset in stark relief: Kapoor wants to be the only person who can use certain paints because that's the only way he can be sure people will value what he makes.
If anyone had "the blackest black" paint, then why would anyone care about Kapoor?
The Gatekeepers of Opportunity
Kapoor's career is illustrative of another kind of gatekeeping: the gatekeeping of opportunity. When we look at art and creative work, we typically consider it at face value. We examine the text in front of us, and respond to it in various ways (emotionally, intellectually, subconsciously) but we don't always consider the surrounding circumstances of the art at the same time.
Why is one painting hanging in a gallery instead of another? Why is one song the top of a Spotify playlist instead of another? Why does Zack Snyder keep getting to make movies? The work that makes it through the filters of funding, editorialization, legal and corporate scrutiny and government regulation is not all the art that exists. But it's all the art we (most of us) get to see. Who decides what makes it through?
Kapoor comes up again here because so much of his work is high-profile public art. This kind of work isn't installed like graffiti in the cover of night (Kapoor isn't running around in a black hoodie at four in the morning planting shiny beans around the worlds largest cities). This work is commissioned either directly or through big open application processes. For most public art, work is proposed by artists and these proposals are reviewed by committees who select the "winning" proposal. These opportunities aren't given out equally, and it's interesting that people who make high-profile art tend to get more high-profile opportunities, isn't it?
You may see the same thing in your local environment with architectural firms or developers constantly winning bids more than anyone else, or on Netflix, where a few show-runners seem to get endless renewals and new contracts while your favourite little show is cancelled after a single season. This isn't proof of some chosen geniuses continually proving their worth in an objective meritocracy, it's a perpetuation of privilege that builds the walls around art higher and higher.
The Gatekeepers of Opportunity get to control what art gets made by manipulating the levers of funding, commissioning and judgement. It just so happens that the people who benefit from this are often well connected to decision makers and have had lots of opportunities in the past.
The Gatekeepers of Economics
A subset of opportunity, when we live in a capitalist society, is the opportunity afforded to you by money. Creative gatekeeping is especially insidious when it comes to money, because of how accessible and free our creativity should be.
But when you start to dig into the creative world, it starts to become clear that it's hard to make anything happen if you don't have a lot of cash. Paint is expensive, sure, but so is a fine-arts education that you likely need to be considered by those public art committees we discussed. On the commercial side, it's no different. Before you can finish paying for an increasingly expensive art education, you need to shell out for an expensive computer (probably and increasingly expensive Mac, because Apple computers are the "standard" in creative industries) and an increasingly expensive subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. Then you'll need an expensive subscription to Squarespace to host your portfolio, where you apply for jobs that require masters degrees for companies that will lay you off after every major project you work on.
The cycle of "making it" in art starts with an extremely high economic barrier, whether you want to be a poet, a painter or make Instagram posts for Wendy's. Like most industries, if you don't have the money (or can't take on the debt) then you're better off forgetting about it entirely. And just like that, the filter makes things a bit easier for those of us lucky enough to be born on the inside of the economic walls.
The Gatekeeper's Paradox
When I say Creative Gatekeepers are operating from a sense of scarcity, it's important to acknowledge what the goal of the gatekeeping is then meant to be: to increase the value of the creativity of the gatekeepers. All that effort that goes into justifying the place the gatekeepers occupy, and all those people who are rejected by them, is meant to make people believe that there's something special about the people manning the gates.
The problem is that, since everyone is creative, you can only establish this dynamic by excluding most people. And people generally don't like being excluded.
This is where the artistic resentment comes from. This is why people turn on the arts entirely. We're all, at some point in our lives, uninhibited in our creativity. But at some point, I believe most of us are made to feel inadequate and like we aren't "allowed" to be creative. That, if our creativity isn't profound, revolutionary or of the highest objective standard, that it is something to be ashamed of. For most people this probably happens as a youth, and the resentment starts to brew from that moment on.
The Gatekeeper's paradox is that, you need to man the gate to maintain your status, but by excluding most people and acting like your position is a divine right, eventually people will stop caring about what is beyond the gates.
When people talk about using generative AI as a way of "democratizing" art and creativity, I see this as the ultimate response to Creative Gatekeeping. We're all inherently creative, and nobody needs to give you permission to make art, but gatekeepers have been so successful at distorting this truth that people have started to believe they need a machine to help them access "creativity." It's a fundamental erosion of a part of our humanity, sure, but it's also a perversion of the very thing the gatekeepers are trying to elevate. Soon, we won't need Anish Kapoor to design another bean because a public art committee could just generate some ideas for installations. And most people wont mind because, to them, Kapoor and the institutes of art have done nothing but reject them and talk down to them since they were children.
When you alienate people from your art in an attempt to make it seem special, all you're doing is alienating yourself from the only thing that makes your art matter: other people.
Accept that Creativity is Average
The only antidote to Creative Gatekeeping is to accept that creativity is nothing special. You need to block out all your instincts pushing you towards scarcity, and push back on people if they claim you're doing something they can't do. Creativity has to belong to everyone, because otherwise we'll find that one day, we've lost the ability to be creative altogether.
There's a humbling that I think "creative" people (people who consider themselves to be artists, work in creative industries, etc.) need to try to internalize. We need to accept that everyone's creative, but that also means that you need to accept that you aren't special for being creative. I know that, personally, I used to feel like a lot of my value came from my creativity. That I was unique and interesting because I could draw, make art, and come up with ideas. But that is actually one of the most average things about me. I'm no more interesting for that than I am for having skin, hair or bones.
The thing that makes us interesting isn't that we are creative. It's what we do with it.
Love,
Simon 🐒
🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠
I couldn't figure out a smooth way to include it in the actual text, but any discussion of the Bean Man would be incomplete without mentioning the protest work of Stuart Semple, who is hilariously petty and fighting back against people like Kapoor in the name of truly democratizing art. Stuart's brilliant protests (like the Pinkest Pink, a colour anyone but Anish Kapoor are allowed to buy) point out just how petty a guy like Kapoor is, and I'm here for all of it.
His work also intersects with Creative Monopolies, when he created the Freetone colour palette for Adobe software after Pantone and Adobe pulled the colours from Adobe programs (and, effectively, censored people's existing artwork).
Also, speaking of Creative Monopolies and the enshittification of online platforms, I feel like I should mention that, while this newsletter is still currently hosted on Substack, I'm feeling a stronger and stronger pull away from the platform. People I admire a lot like David Farrier and Paris Marx have both made the leap from Substack over to Ghost, but I feel like we're missing a viable, smaller, less expensive (i.e. lower economic barrier) option for people with little newsletters like mine. Ghost is cool, but it isn't cheap, and the other "free" or cheap newsletter tools are just as jacked up on enshittification and startup bullshit as Substack.
All that is just to say that I'm exploring my options and that at some point in the near future, you may be receiving Everyone's Creative from a less Nazi-infested hellhole, which feels like a positive change to look forward to. In the meantime, subscribing by email here means you can seamlessly migrate somewhere else with me in the future. You can also follow my personal site for updates, or check me out on Mastodon instead of Substack Notes.
Finally, as I consider migrating off Substack, I wanted to share this blog post about blog posts. If you're a small, independent artist (writer, illustrator, video maker, etc.) publishing things online, I would urge you to give it a read and to consider disabling or even just looking at analytics less.
The banner image for this post uses this photo of the Bean man, taken by Vogler. That image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, and so the artwork from this post is, too.
It also uses the image View of the Gothaer Castle with ground plans of the pleasure garden. by Georg Andreas Böckler, c. 1664. Sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive.
Meanwhile, I thought it'd be fun to use an image of the bean itself, but instead I thought it illustrative to include the "Other Information" text from the Wikimedia Commons image of the bean, justifying it's existence on Wikimedia and preemptively defending it from Bean Man, who has demonstrated his litigiousness in the past.
_from_east%27.jpg){kind=link}
The sculptor, Anish Kapoor, is known to be highly litigious and once sued the NRA for including a shot of Cloud Gate in a video. It is therefore reasonable to assume that no permission to publish a photograph of Cloud Gate under a free license will be granted.
Use of this image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute his original work.
Both readers and the copyright holder(s) will benefit significantly from readers being able to identify the art visually when reading the cited articles.
This is an image in Cloud Gate, which is an article that entirely consists of analysis, commentary and criticism of the Cloud Gate.
The image is only being used for informational purposes to depict the most important feature of the art work in the article.
Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because it exemplifies an important topic from this article.
copies made from a half megapixel image will be of very inferior quality to the tall sculpture
the image is only being used for the purpose of analysis or criticism,
there is no alternative, public domain or free-copyrighted replacement available.
Don't be like the Bean Man.