When Your Art Gets Rejected

When I was in grad school I did a lot of what we called the “crit”. That is short for critique. What that meant is that anywhere from 1 to 20 people with crowd around your new, adorable, fresh off the vine, wet behind the ears, defenseless artwork and tell you EXACTLY what they thought about it. The cadre would include professors, visiting artists, grad school peers, and random folks wandering around the art department.

Sometimes, I would host five or six crits a day. It was grueling. Everybody has a different opinion, everybody would see different things, everybody had various levels of generosity and kindness in their approach.  Meaning:  it was brutal. There were at least a couple of my grad school peers that couldn't take the crit culture, washed out, packed up, and quit.

But I learned something invaluable from it. I learned that to succeed and thrive in the critique, I needed to disassociate my ego and my identity with the art that I had made.  It became as if we were talking about someone else’s art. I took notes on everything, asked follow-up questions, and never, ever, EVER let myself get emotionally involved.

I learned that hearing what other people thought— the good, the bad, and the ugly—provided another piece of the puzzle. Every comment, whether I agreed or not, was another little slice of perspective that would help me gain insight into what it is but I was making, what I was thinking, and what it looked like to a new observer.

C.S. Lewis said, "True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less."

If we invest our identity in the art we make, the money we make, the food we make, and how we look in a bikini (to name a few), we’re always going to be wrestling with our demons. By identity I mean attributing our worth and value towards something external. By demons I mean the forces that keep us hooked on a "likes and follows" loop.

Social media is one of the more obvious and addictive forms of the inferiority loop.  Terrified of being "unliked" we desperately attempt to create likeable content, and then become deeply emotionally dependent on the aforementioned likes.

If I am “unliked” or if a piece of content doesn’t perform well, it’s becomes painful proof that my deep fears are actually true. I’m setting myself up for a loop of sensitivity to other people’s judgments, the comparison trap, and extreme disappointment when we don’t measure up. We’re addicted to the positive reinforcement, and destroyed by difficult feedback.

 "[Addicts] are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of s**t that the world revolves."  --as quoted by Anthony Kiedis (of all people).

You don't have to be an addict to be an egomaniac, but it helps. 

Egomaniacs are likely to engage in exaggeration, hypersensitivity, fishing for compliments, and being extremely judgmental about other people.   Is it just me or does that sound a whole lot like Instagram?

I hear from a lot of artists on social media that they fear trolls, mean comments, and judgements within the app (and I can only assume, beyond).  But social media is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Here's my strong advice: get rejected, get insulted, and get criticized as much as possible.  I'm not saying to make polarizing content just for the sake of it (although it works for some people).  I'm saying deliver yourself, uncovered,  to your world: vulnerably, truthfully, and often.  You might not be into social media, so this you could be doing this in your job, your passions, your relationships, your family.

And live your truth, friend.  When you've made a vulnerable choice to bring something precious into a public discourse, observe the results like a clinician wearing a lab coat with a clipboard. And safety goggles.  And a hard hat.  I promise, the more you get rejected, judged, and sneered, the less it will ultimately matter.