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“It takes a lot of confidence to doubt yourself that much.
But what impressed me most among my subjects, perhaps because
*I come from academia, was their universal sense of openness: to ideas, experience, other perspectives. Academics are “no” people. Their impulse is to shoot things down-understandably, since knowledge advances through the rigorous examination of claims (which, formalized, is peer review). But such healthy skepticism easily becomes a morbid rejectionism.
With academics, it is always “I don’t think that’s right” and “you don’t have permission to” and “that’s been done before.” (Wrong! Five points off.) Academics tend to entrench themselves in their little areas of expertise and fire at anyone who approaches.
But artists are “yes” people. In art, there is no right or wrong, no expertise to detend.
Artists say “go ahead.” They say “what if?” and “why not?” They say, not “prove it,” but as Diaghilev famously did to Cocteau, “astonish me.” Their identity is fluid; they define themselves in terms, not of their past achievements, but of their current project.
Artists are oriented toward the future; they regard the world as full of possibilities. “We speak in vision,” said Katrina Frye, the photographer and artists’ consultant. When artists look at a blank canvas, she said, they see what could be there. “