My class of Senior Visual Arts students read an article called “Against Competition” by Marc Fischer and a discussion centered around competition amongst artists, artists’ collectives and the impossibility of a “new” idea. These are my thoughts on the article:

Competition is inevitable, it’s a survival instinct. It’s the reason I cried louder than my brother when I was a baby and also the reason the dog peed on my toys; there was only one Mom and we all wanted her.

In many cases competition fosters creativity by forcing your mind to reject the first thing you think of in favor of the 18th thing you thought of. Competition motivates you to never become complacent.

On the flip side, sometimes competition just produces a lot of screaming babies. When the pressure to preform becomes such that it is impossible to think outside of pleasing a set group of people then any subsequent ‘art’ produced is, to a degree, divorced from the artist and can only be as good as the individual(s) who commissioned the piece.

This brings up the idea of collaboration, which in some ways, distances individual artists from a specific piece/work by doing away with the idea of singular ownership. I struggled a bit with this idea of ownership myself in the ability to categorize what work that I’ve done as “mine” versus “ours.”

I don’t think I’m the only person or artist that enjoys being able to claim an idea as ”mine.” The more you can take ownership of something the more credit you can get and the less you feel you have to prove, because like it or not we’re all trying to prove something, even if it’s just to ourselves. For myself, this idea of ownership has expanded to include collaborative efforts, but on a less specific level. I can be proud of the team and the body of work produced by the team and be proud of my contribution.

Collaboration can take many forms. One that I have found helpful is peer critiques. Being accountable for your work in front of your peers can be brutal, but it makes you better at what you do.