Confusing "Different" with "Better"

Gallery Night was this weekend, and it was the first time in a long time that I went. It was artistically stimulating, as usual; I had the chance to absorb the details of hundreds of works of art by established and emerging area artists.

Since I’ve been making more time to do art recently, having the chance to expose myself to a bunch of other artists (somewhere other than the Internet) was helpful. But it wasn’t long before I caught myself dumping all the work I was seeing into two buckets: better and worse—than my own artwork, that is. (And it didn’t help that the people I was with kept saying things like, “Could you do that? How about that?”)

“That’s been done before—lame,” I said. Or, “This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. Why do I even bother doing art when there are people out there who can do stuff like this?” It was reasonable for me to consider the stuff that was “better” than mine to be almost divine work, but the stuff that was “worse” than mine just made me sick to my stomach because it was being shown on Gallery Night while my stuff hasn’t really seen the light of day. “Maybe this stuff really is better than mine,” I thought.

Eventually I came across some work that was done in watercolor with ink outlining, the same method that I’ve been working with for the past few years. The artist’s linework was far superior to mine, I thought, as were her treatment of the medium, her colors… That’s when I wanted to give up most. Her art was just so much better than mine, I thought.

But now I’ve had a few days to mull this all over, and I’ve been reminded of something I realized—or pretended to have realized—some time ago: These other artists’ work isn’t better or worse than mine; it’s just different. (And thinking about it now, it’s certainly good that my work is different than theirs, because if it were the same I’d be in an even worse place.) 

So that’s it: There is no “better” in art, just “different.” Now, I’m sure art critics wouldn’t allow that to suffice, but I do.