See you next year, I am a writer now.
On defining yourself, "the cost of convenience", and being a writer, maybe.
We’ve been eating panettone for five days and my stomach might turn into a chocolate brioche before I finish this piece. Since I arrived in Spain, I’ve been fed with food and love, enough to regain the strength to tell you that nothing good happened to me this year, except that I started to become a writer. I think.
Surely you’ve heard the tale of the creative mind yearning to become a something. Surely you are one of them, or should I say, one of us.
To be honest, this wasn't the direction I had planned for this last post of the year, but Assata has published her latest essay, The Cost of Convenience: We have fallen out of love with the process, and I couldn't pretend that it didn’t do something to me. In Your soul for a glass of Champaign I talked about the cost of access to a world of art and privilege, of Paris, the pretending and the loss of oneself. When I was still running for my life in this hamster wheel of a city, what struck me was the evident shallowness of people and things. Don’t get me wrong, Paris can be magical, but the shiny surface easily crumbled once I took the time to scrape it with my undone nails. Everyone is running and the wheel is crowded, there is no time for diving deep or insisting, people are here to sell, sometimes art, mostly themselves. I described it as a cult of confidence, or to be more precise, fake confidence, because let me tell you, I’ve never been surrounded by so much insecurity in my entire life. But truly, it was the cult of the defining. If you keep repeating that you are a something, people will eventually identify you as such, and after a while, you’ll become the something of the group, even though you barely took the time to learn the craft and you practiced maybe twice.
Defining yourself first instead of simply doing and letting your work speak for itself is, for me, a cry to be identifiable with something you haven’t yet spent the time to truly understand or even yet become.
I tried. I was a curator and an art manager for four months before I realized it was all a scam. Just like I suspected it would be. Sometimes the imposter syndrome is not a syndrome. Sometimes, you are the imposter. I know it might sound harsh, that no, you are not the thing if you haven’t learned how to do it and done it many times. Creativity doesn’t occur out of thin air, it requires time, nurturing, learning of the past and the present, connecting and doing. I’m not necessarily a gatekeeper as I know that more often than not it benefits the people who can afford to pass the gate, and a handful of disadvantaged lucky ones. I believe in what I see and if I see a curator that doesn’t get the essence of curating, a writer that doesn’t have anything to say, or an artist that doesn’t work on their craft, I see nothing. I see us playing make-believe.
Fake it ‘til you make it.
Craft is a lost art, but first was patience and time. […] When I talk about craftsmanship I’m speaking both literally and metaphorically, from the fact that we don’t use our hands anymore but more importantly our brains.
I remember my surprise when the people in my art market school, the art gallerists of tomorrow, or whatever the school told us we would become, were not reading much and were using chatgpt to write basic essays. In a field where everything is held together by symbols and meaning, where people pay thousands, millions, for abstraction, we weren’t learning about why, and no one seemed to question it. It was hard to believe that in a meaningless world, even the thing that only exists because of its meaning gets emptied, denied of it. Meaning doesn’t mean anything anymore. We stopped caring. I was older than most and I came from a world of overthinkers. After studying anthropology, journalism, and some communication, I was prepared to intellectualize the art market. It was not the place. I hate to say it, but social media and IA really are rotting our brains. Assata said it better than me, but you get the idea. I fully embrace my need for writing on paper, for reading books about things I want to know more of, for binge-watching YouTube videos about my new obsessions, intellectualizing everything and never using chatgpt again. Not because I am better than anyone else, but because I value the work and effort it took to become who I am. The people who taught me, the books I read, the movies and documentaries I watched, the museums I walked into, the long conversations I had, the exhibitions I attended, the artists that inspired me. Everything. And I intend to not let it be for nothing. This is how I became a writer.
The problem with the easy route is that it doesn’t take passion in a field that requires a lot of it. I used to see these people in their early twenties stating that they were something, yet being so young and clueless about so much. The aesthetic of the thing was more appealing than the work required to do a good job at it. If your Instagram says so, you are. Dress for the job before you even get to your first day, and share the outfit on your stories. I thought wow, gen Zers are so confident!, when in reality a blow in the wrong direction reveals shaky foundations and flaking paint. We do things, the doing is here, but sometimes it’s not enough, sometimes it’s misdirected. Sometimes you need learning. There’s this strange discomfort about calling yourself an apprentice, a wannabe, in the process of. It might be too vulnerable, admitting that you are trying, meaning that you might fail. You need to be the thing at twenty-five. After reaching the quarter life milestone, you have five years left to appear in the next 30 under 30. Hush, hush now!
I was twenty-seven and wondering why every other person was telling me that I looked young for my age, even thought I was still in the same decade as them. I sometimes felt like I was already a middle age woman looking at her past full of regrets and incomprehension, how the fuck did I end up here? But the truth is, I was so young, and I still am. I guess they didn't know that your face doesn't fill up with wrinkles in the span of five years, you pretty much still look the same and you still have time to become whatever you are so obsessed about. You don’t have to do it by the time you reach twenty-five, or thirty, or even forty, but let’s not scare them of, being twenty-two is exhausting, I get it.
I got my first camera at eighteen, and eleven years later I am still not a photographer, even thought I am not giving up on that dream. Whenever a friend introduced me as a such, I’d correct them right away, I’m just a person who enjoys taking pictures, nothing crazy! I rushed to lower expectations that weren’t even that high in the first place. Because what I picture as a photographer is so much more, yet I learned that you don’t even have to be half as good to call yourself one. So sure, I was being modest, but I was also telling the truth.
After years of taking pictures, I still don’t consider myself a photographer. I’ve been passionate about art for the same amount of time, and I am not a curator yet, not giving up on that dream either. I’ve been writing since I've known how to write, on journals, as an apprentice journalist, as a communicator, now as writer.
And I am a writer, in process, because I became one.
The quotes are from Assata’s essay, The Cost of Convenience: We have fallen out of love with the process, that inspired me enough to hijack this piece. I didn’t want to show too much because you have to read everything. So I really urge you to read and support her amazing work.
If you want to read more of my work, it’s here!
Hi, I’m Angèle, the woman behind Hey, I Curate. Thank you for spending some time with my words, it means a lot to me. If you are reading this between the time I published it and the beginning of 2025, I wish you a very happy new year! 2024 was shit but I can only hope for a brighter 2025. I don’t have many good resolutions for the year to come, only for it to be better than the last one. I send you all love, wish you good health, and the strength to keep doing that thing that makes your days a little lighter.
Maybe instead of “I am XY”, we should say “I do XY”. I guess people don’t do it, because it implies some level of responsibility. Carrying titles is just so much easier, creating the illusion that we are complete and rescuing us from facing our naked selves.
The fear of not having anything meaningful to say as a writer is real. There’s so much here that resonates with me and none of it is easily solved without doing the work. I love your reminder that beautiful things take time to create. Not just the moment they are finished or the time it takes to create it. Our work is a reflection of our entire lives and we haven’t lived long enough to grasp the meaning inherent to it. This piece is lovely because although you’re still in the process of becoming, it is indeed impactful