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When was the last time your accountant told you she didn't read all the
fine print in the tax papers because she didn't want to overwork you deductions....?
I've often thought how nice it would be to have a job where I knew that
if I just slogged away for "X" number of hours a day, the task
would be done right. The more hours I put in, the better the outcome would
be. Knowing when to stop would be easy -- just a matter of persevering until
the grass was all cut, or the columns balanced.
The constant threat of overworking seems to be the artist's hobgoblin. Writers
talk about having a "block" and one hears of the paralysis of
the empty canvas, but it seems to me that starting is the easy part. Knowing
when to quit is agonizing (I'm still haunted by that leftover fear from
art school days that if I haven't spent the expected number of hours on
an assignment, it just isn't finished). Unlike accounting or refrigerator
repair, art is one line of work in which good old plodding toil may not
always be a virtue.
What artist hasn't started a piece with freshness and vigor, only to realise
later that in his very enthusiasm and diligence to do a good job, he has
throttled the life out of the thing? Some styles and media seem more prone
to this than others. Perhaps that was one of the inspirations for minimalism:
avoidance of overworking by doing as little as possible. On the other hand,
more rococo artists have had the moxie to make "overworkedness"
a style in itself and make no apologies for it.
This issue is one thing that makes it so hard to price art. The guy who
comes to fix your refrigerator doesn't sit at home for hours studying the
"essence" of refrigerator and then suddenly charge into your house,
clang things around for half an hour, pronounce he's satisfied with it and
hand you a bill. He bills you based on the materials used and the hourly
rate for the time spent putting the parts in. If the artist billed that
way, he might charge so much for materials, total up the hours actually
spent on the piece and there would be an end to it. Of course, there would
be the temptation to just work the thing into the ground because of a framing
bill due that month, or if he were really an honest guy, he might see that
he had overworked the piece, and you would see something on the bill like
"15% discount for superfluous work".
How do you know when a work of art is "finished" anyway? I KNOW
when my refrigerator's finished (I think). As far as I'm concerned, it's
done when it keeps things cold and the parts are off my kitchen floor. Then
it's finished, and I'm willing to pay for the work. But to pronounce a piece
of art "finished" requires amazing confidence. To make that determination
is an act of creation in itself, to assert: "it is finished -- it is
the most what it is that it could ever be and to do any more - to
overwork it - would diminish it".
I wonder if this is partly what makes art hard to deal with as a business.
The work ethic that says if you just put enough elbow grease and time into
a task it will ultimately turn out all right doesn't always apply in art.
In fact, it's a lot easier to put in hours than to take responsibility for
that final determination that says, "enough". I suspect it's that
kind of intuition and experience that could make an art out of any business.
But it sure makes it challenging to make a business out of art.
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