Preview & Edit
Skip to Content Area

Bolstering Artistic Self-Esteem in the Age of Commoditization

"Self-esteem is that which gives us a feeling of well-being, a feeling that everything's going to be all right - that we can determine our own course and that we can travel that course."

By Ellen Vrana

"Fundamental to becoming an artist is understanding the position of the artist." American actress Anna Deavere Smith (Born on September 18, 1950) instructs her reading audience in the divine Letters to a Young Artist. "We learn to do that by learning how to step outside of a given situation to watch, to listen, and to feel, and to feel as others as much as to feel things about others."

Bird. My occasional visitor and full-time esteem-bolsterer. Named for Anne Lamott's seminal writing guide Bird by Bird.

Deavere Smith has built an estimable career on screen and stage by directing her empathic abilities to physically and emotionally embody another person, bringing those individuals to life for her audience. Empathy is also at the heart of her exploration of having self-esteem as an artist, even in this age of art commoditization.

It's about your worth. Your self-worth. [...] You-and only you can ultimately put the price tag on that. Your tag reveals not only how you value yourself, but how imaginative and original you are about valuing others. In my experience, happier people are people who have not only a high price tag on themselves but a high price tag on the people around them the tags don't necessarily have to do with market value. They have to do with all the sense that adds up to human value.

Deavere Smith continues:

Self-esteem is that which gives us a feeling of well-being, a feeling that everything's going to be all right, that we can determine our own course, and that we can travel that course. It's not that we travel the course alone, but we need the feeling of agency-that if everything were to fall apart, we could find a way to put things back together again. And hopefully, we'd never get to that, because we would have watched out for hazards.  

On the difference between self-esteem and confidence, Deavere Smith argues that the former is intrinsic to the latter.

The term "self-esteem" is more clinical as if it comes out of psychotherapies. Right? Like, educators might say that poor children who grow up without parental guidance or involvement in their education lack "self-esteem." They'd say that before they'd say they lack "confidence." Perhaps confidence is an offshoot of self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to your general state of well-being, the way you think about yourself.

The engagement and expansion of self-esteem is a critical aspect of its vitality. In other words, to fully realize and nurture self-esteem, we do self-estimable things towards others. Even something as subtle and indirect as trying to understand the artist's position. Deavere Smith explains the warmth to be found when others understand us (or our work):

What if you did a painting just for your family and unveiled it on a family holiday? There might be one person or two people who would "get" what you are doing. Others might see it as "weird" or simply "artistic" (whatever that means). The nineteenth-century Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's great play The Seagull captures this perfectly in one of the opening scenes. A young man, Kostya, is putting on a play. It's an innovative play. (It isn't ever clear whether it's a good play.) He casts a girl whom he loves in the play. She seems distracted. He presents the play to his mother, a famous actress, who is visiting the country estate where he lives with his aging uncle. His mother is accompanied by her lover, who is a famous writer. Everything goes wrong. It's a catastrophe, and he is beside himself. A family friend, Dr. Dorn, approaches him when all the audience has left and says, "I liked your play." What he meant was that he understood what Kostya was trying to do.

There is a moment in Lynne Sharon Schwartz's memoir of the mind and soul of a reader where the author mentions giving her parents a copy of Kafka's The Trial (his most autobiographical story). 

Their response is weighty and inspiring:

'That book you recommended,' my father began with his customary abruptness. 'By that Kafka. The Trial.' 'Yes?' I said eagerly. 'Did you read it?' 'Well, that's what I'm calling you about. Your mother and I both read it and we have very different opinions about what it means. I say it's about the injustice of the legal system and the modern state... She says it's just about life itself, how you're always guilty about something or other and you feel you deserve to be punished simply for being alive.' He paused. My heart leaped. This was exactly what I wanted. We should theorize this way every waking hour.

This exchange is saying faithfully to one another: 'This thing that you care about, I also care about. This thing you made also matters to me and affects me. Aside from money or upvotes or other market-driven identifiers of value.'

Illustration by Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet with a short but explosive writing career exploring the duality of life, death, hope, and disillusionment. He was shot by Spain's fascist Government in 1936 for his poetry and homosexuality.

Artists create things that matter in the form of art. They put those things into the world to affect someone else. It is devastatingly fearsome because there is no guarantee anyone else will value that art, that thing that matters to the artist. But someone does, Deavere Smith encourages; it bolsters our self-esteem and theirs. Moreover, this empathy-based trade deals a blow to a prevailing value system based on eroding taste rather than one of lasting human meaning.

Anna

Contact


This field is required.
This field is required.

Subject

Support Sales Feedback Other
Send
Reset Form