What you have to do to be an artist

Too many live by art but are not artists. Go for a walk through a park on a warm day and you might see men playing with a ball. Even though they are playing football you would not describe them as footballers. They are Postmen, engineers, labourers or drivers. They score goals and stick to the same rules, but are not what they seem. The real footballers are elsewhere, giving their lives to the game and the game to their lives.
Those who do art as a recreation are far better focused than those who serve one master and think themselves better because they do nothing else. To be good is not good enough. To have flair for art is to be better than others who haven't a clue, which simply removes you from the majority. Potential is only promise and promises are often broken.
To be an artist is to be careless of the progress made while embracing the obstacles still to be overcome. It is not desire for reputation but resolution to clarity, even if you want to be clear to confuse. Art is not an open field with indistinct boundaries. It is a place made real by others of a contrasting frame of mind who look in from the outside. People you are not unhappy to be apart from. To be artistic is not to join Gertrude Stein salons where all are members of vanity gangs, surviving on sycophantic compliments from others who exist likewise.
Art is not anything goes. It is the disciplined indiscipline. The discipline is there and is enforced by the disposition of the artist. Not by his work, for the work comes from that disposition, but from the experience of endurance, through consistency and self-criticism. Working hard does not make an artist but it makes the artist. The indiscipline is the necessary freedom in his work that can be a deliberate or subconscious reaction against his own principles. But because artists are their own legislators, he cannot be free of them entirely and his work will have caution, no matter how it appears. If his principles include integrity his work will always possess truth. The self-criticism, the principles and establishment of method can only really develop when he is alone, when his thoughts and ideas rebound inside himself to evolve into possible opportunities. To discuss them with anyone else, especially other artists, reduces the internal force that helps create his work.
Fakers would define loneliness as being away from company, not as solitude vital for work to be done. Henry Miller said the artist is always alone if he is an artist. It is what he needs. There are too many impostors in art and they work hard on two things; their image and their belief. They mistake art as an outlet for the promotion of controversy and personality and there is an abuse of the exemption from restriction which art often personifies. Talent can scandalize but to scandalize does not imply talent. They would not understand that to be conscious of your own belief is to have an artificial compulsion, a manufactured fuel for a manufactured engine.
To be an artist is not to need a belief. It is to be resigned, to be almost helpless. The problem with surrendering yourself is that the drive that leads you on can seem limitless, which apparently it is not. You think that because it will always be there, no effort is needed to rouse inspiration. What you think is patience is really laziness.
Art has to be removed from College curriculum and University courses. It is not an option from a wide choice of professions but an inclination separate from routine. To work at art in seminar clusters is to impede the opening of ideas and there can follow no desperation for discovery. Most students of art want to be artists and enjoy the impersonation of the Bohemian. For them it is not a vocation but a fashion and they become nothing more than the finished article their University has made them. They are simply qualified artists, and to measure talent by qualification is to grade the artist and that suggests that some are better than others only because their certificate says so.
Art's intention is the pursuit of emotional disturbance. Music is the most accessible art from which these emotions can be unsettled and it is the sensations of sadness or joy that is stimulated through this medium which identifies art closer to people better than any other. This is art's beauty and it's reason.
Most events in our lives run on the pathways of what might be called rationality, the pavements premeditated. When we listen to music we like, we sometimes slip from this walkway, or drift a little sideways and feel slightly light-headed because we are experiencing something we haven't the perception to understand. It can be forceful enough to invigorate, but may be too brief to be taken as remarkable. To most, it is not so much the effect of music as the temperament of themselves, and they would be reluctant to admit that one plays on the response of the other.
In art galleries, leaving the premeditated pavements requires a more discernible awareness, which is why it is always so quiet. No one wants to risk ridicule by giving an uneducated opinion about the intention of the artist. But most of them are a bad waste of time because the artist, as he works, hardly knows himself.