There is no such thing as talent.
This is what I choose to believe.
It is a choice, not provable or disprovable. As in my artistic practice, I do not ask: Is this finally true? Rather I ask: Is this generative? What does it give rise to?
For me, talent gives rise to fixed and constrained possibilities.
Am I talented? As with all ungenerative questions, neither answer nourishes. The untalented are doomed to mediocrity; the talented can take little credit for their creations.
I should, yes, disclose that I do not feel particularly talented myself. Perhaps my disbelief in talent is self-protective, and so be it.
I don’t know what you believe about talent. Perhaps feeling talented fuels your work. But the grand myths of artistic talent, their use and misuse by non-artists, piss me off. (If you want my not-entirely-crackpot theory about where "talents" come from, skip to the bottom.)
Untalented artist (me) lifting my dear dance friend, Heather. In case you don't know, the lifted person does the most important and difficult work in this kind of partnering.
Talent reinforces the myth that art is birthed spontaneously and instinctively, flung into the world in spasms of Van Gogh-esque expulsion. Talent erupts, unrehearsed and unplanned, spewing brilliance and beauty. It is wild and heedless. The talented artist may well be thought unbalanced, magical, mad.
Actual artistic creation is slow, at times a slog, accompanied by hundreds of hours of plain effort and dumpsters of deleted material, the copious negative results so essential to creation. Would you think me a “talented writer” if I told you my first novel took seven years to write?
A choreographer I adore is introduced by a curator presenting her latest chaotic-magical-ruthless show. He rambles on about her rare talent. He will pay her $350 to perform for the weekend.
My dear dance company)laying our own marley floor for the prestigious touring gig where the presenter stiffed us out of $3,000 in travel expenses.
Talent is ethereal; artistic practice is embodied and weighted. Struggle, trial and error, and useful dead ends are foundational, and they separate artistic practice from the formulaic, instrumentalized processes of product development. Effort, labor, research, dialogue—all are elided by the idea of talent. Talent materializes shiny fruits from the ether, rather than from our plowed fields, June frosts, and failed crops.
As I told my high school students: “The first five letters in choreography are CHORE.” (Feel free to use that one, dance friends.)
Talent makes us enchanted creatures, untethered from the constraints of labor and resource, and is thus one more excuse to underpay us.
If you pay for my talent, that’s free money for me, a gratuity for my inherent, effortless mastery. If you pay for my decades of artistic practice and research and my weeks of toil, that’s compensation, not honorarium or stipend (both derived from the Latin for: I pay you crap.)
Perhaps most damagingly, talent is individualist, erasing community, connection, and interdependence, the true wellsprings of artistic growth. Art is an ecosystem, talent a monoculture. The profound and generative energies of an artist network, a scene, do so much to birth resonant art. But it is cheaper—and more in keeping with capitalist narratives—to pluck and fund one Talented Artist from that scene.
A beloved spoken word artist works in a generous, cantankerous scene where artists push and support each other so thoroughly that shove and support are indistinguishable. A funder grants him a prize and, paying no attention or money to that ecosystem, declares him “a gem, a unique voice, a talent beyond measure, an ambassador for our city.”
I want to dignify artist work. This is a profession that unfolds over decades. It is hard. Like any profession, more perhaps, art making grows and flourishes through hours and years of effort. While based in inspiration, it is built around constant grunt work, scheduling, emails, and schlepping things about. The job description for Professional Choreographer ought to begin: Must be able to carry heavy things and schedule large groups of busy people.
I want to describe skilled artists the way we describe skilled doctors: as learned, expert, practiced, competent, proficient, accomplished, diligent, tenacious.
And like doctors and scientists, we do not rise up alone. We stand on and beside the shoulders of collaborators, mentors, ancestors, and fellow artists whose work excites us or infuriates us. We respond, pollinate, infect, collide.
Artists work in ecosystems, creative biomes that hold and reimagine culture. If you want to understand or nourish our work, first understand and nourish that.
For myself, I ask about talent what I ask about feedback: Does it make me want to get back in the studio, back to making?
Talent does not.
And so I sit down at my desk, chair squeaking, glass of seltzer perspiring in the Philadelphia heat.
I return, untalented, to my Work.
Postscript: So where do talents come from, Andrew?
If there is no talent, how do I account for the oners, the exceptional, the singular?
I do believe certain artists possess superpowers, but, to me, most seem honed, not god-given.
A fuel for my artistic practice—or any Work—is the quiet, invisible things I do all day. Where I place my attention moment by moment generates, over years and decades, skills that look a lot like talent. My hours in the studio are dwarfed by my hours perceiving, thinking, piecing together.
What my mind does “at rest” can be powerful fuel for creating and can become my talent.
A theater director I know is constantly sensing and making sense of the emotional energies around her. From early childhood, she put in thousands of silent hours refining that awareness because she grew up in emotionally fraught situations and needed those skills as protection, refuge, distraction. Directing a play, this comes across as Talent, an innate gift for emotional undertones. It is not innate or god-given, rather an awareness and analysis cultivated out of necessity.
A small personal example: I spend a lot of time “singing” the rhythms of people’s speech. They are music. They have beauty as melodies, and they often hold—in contrast to the words’ literal meaning—the speaker’s subtle and layered interior life. That is to say, I learn more from the song of your speech than the transcript. The back and forth of conversation is call-and-response, an improvised duet of harmony and interruption, rhythms agreed upon and broken. When my editor says I “have a gift for dialogue,” I think: Should I tell her I am hearing her words as a song?
Write what you know is well-worn advice to tell stories close to your experience. I would say: Write what you do. Make art using the quiet, ongoing practices that fill your hours. And wait for people to exclaim, “Such talent!”
This writing is for a sequel to Making your Life as an Artist (maybe titled Sustaining Your Life as an Artist, what do you think?) about the long arc, living for decades in a culture that extracts artists' Work while abandoning us economically.