Artist vs. Entertainer: Fight!

I’ve spent more than a decade working with a lot of creative types, and they are wonderful people (I like to think I’m occasionally one of them). But, man, a lot of them do some serious work freshly forging themselves a daily dose of unhappiness, and I want to talk about a particular pattern I see in much of that. So here goes.

Creative work often collides with commerce at some point in its lifecycle. By the time it does, it’s important that a creative person knows where they fall on what I think of as the “artist vs. entertainer” spectrum. To get into what that is, I first need to define the poles.

What’s an Artist?

An artist’s priority is on the art, which also defines the end-point of the creative effort. Once the artist creates the artwork, their job is done. Happiness with the result’s quality as they perceive it is paramount.

Importantly, money and an audience doesn’t enter into it (and can’t, really, in the pure form of this stance).

Broadly, if an artist earns money from their artwork, it runs along the lines of a lottery ticket. Often it doesn’t pay out, but sometimes, if they’re lucky, they can score—and much more rarely, score big.

What’s an Entertainer?

An entertainer’s priority is on the audience. Audience reception and approval (which can be turned into money as the entertainer hones their craft) is the “point.”

A committed entertainer recognizes that if the audience takes priority, a certain amount of control has to be given over to them. That means compromise, and not always taking the work in a direction that an artist (see above) could (and should) go. But that’s all fine.

The audience’s reaction and approval is the end result they seek. It’s the product that they can sell, if they’re so inclined.

Lifestyle or Stance?

So is this something you are (a lifestyle) or is this something you can occupy (a stance) on a project-by-project basis? From what I’ve seen over the years, I think it can be a stance, and likely should be, but comfortably occupying one stance or the other takes practice, so it can be hard at times to move beyond treating it as more of a lifestyle.

The heart wants what the heart wants, but it can be taught to develop a taste for other things.

Continuum or Switch?

“Someone is either a smoker or a nonsmoker. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that.” — Robin Williams as “Cozy” Carlisle in Dead Again

So far I’ve been talking about artist and entertainer as if they are modes—switches, in other words, which (if you learn how) you can flip to one setting or the other depending on what sort of work you’re looking to do.

If you think that’s a bit reductive, you’re right, but it has the benefit of offering two focused, pure perspectives. The poles of the continuum offer the least emotional ambiguity and the greatest clarity of purpose.

Hybrids do exist out there, balancing the priorities of art and entertainment. But I tend to regard this as success at a cost, and that price is a whole pile of unhappiness.

So occupy a midpoint if you must, but be ready for the bill. I think you’ll find greater happiness if you can learn the trick of knowing which one you are for the project you’re on. Not to mention, a middle point is definitely the most difficult of the three options.

Publishers, Necessarily, are Entertainers

Publishers (like me) are in the business of taking creative work (whether it’s their own or someone else’s) and finding an audience for it. If someone’s a publisher for business reasons—i.e., to turn that audience into money, and use that money to pay people and publish more things—that’s great, and hopefully they’re good at doing that. But their focus is on the audience, and that fits the entertainer stance.

That’s not to say an artist can’t share their work, put it out there, even make money from it, but, again, I’m pretty darn convinced that that’s the lottery ticket scenario I mentioned above. While that might fit the technical definition of publishing, I think calling it publishing muddies the water if you’re not also clear about whether that publishing is being done from an artist or entertainer stance.

People who are in the business of publishing are, necessarily, entertainers.

Creative Folk and the High Price of Satisfaction

Like Robin Williams said, you’re either a smoker or you’re not. If you try to be both, you’re setting yourself up for a big pile of unhappiness if you can’t figure out the very tricky calculus of balancing two priorities that are often in conflict.

Do you create the art you want to create with money being a bit of a crapshoot, or do you make compromises to entertain the audience in the interests of growing that audience and hopefully turning their attention into cash?

Maybe you’ve figured out how to balance those two. Maybe you were lucky enough to create the art that you want to create, no compromises, and that art happens to line up with what so many people out there want to see that it just so happens you’ve got an entertainer’s audience without occupying an entertainer’s priorities and craftwork. There are certainly people out there who fit that rarest of molds—but we hear about them because they were lucky enough to find success, so that’s a bit of a survivor bias. It’s hard to emulate a fluke and end up with the same benefits.

Around about there are where the horns of the dilemma are found. If you’re looking to create the art you alone want to make and get somewhere where creating that art is the work you do to make a living, you’re going to find yourself impaled.

Knowing whether you’re approaching your art as an artist or an entertainer (as I’ve defined them here) will help you decide how to get up and off of those horns.

If creating the art you want to see made is what’s most important to you, then ignore the chuckleheads in the comments (or just turn the fucking comments off), and go full throttle at that target. Make that thing. You’ll likely need to find your money elsewhere, but the world will fill up with the work you want to see done, and you’ll have all the control over it you can handle.

If you’re looking to make a living off of creative work, however, you’re going to need to practice your compromise skills, your listening skills, and the craft skills necessary to deliver what the audience is looking for.

Entertainment sometimes gets dismissed as “formulaic” but I’m struck at times by how often people miss the core concept there that the formula is there because it works. There’s no guarantee you’ll make money when you take on the entertainer stance, but by honing those skills and being ready to compromise, you’ll be alert to the opportunities to take your shot, and you’ll start to notice that there’s more than one of them out there.

There’s no universal right answer here, only right fits for the specifics of your situation, your happiness drive, your goals. But if you find yourself regularly unhappy with the fruits of your creative work, maybe take a look through this lens, and figure out if you’re trying to occupy a midpoint on the continuum instead of one of the poles.

If your dissatisfaction is arising from the friction between the two conflicting goals, cut one out and see where that gets you. Commit to your choice, and commit hard. If the audience genuinely doesn’t matter (artist), remove the audience from your evaluation of your work. If the audience does matter (entertainer), find out what they actually want and see what you can change to bring it to them. Whatever your choice, develop a taste for it through repetition, practice, and reflection upon its positives. And if it turns out that that’s increasing your happiness (as I suspect it will), you’ve got your answer—or, at the least, another tool for your toolbox.