The Responsibility of the Artist

To be an artist is to commit to a peculiar sort of madness. It’s a madness that wears the clothes of patience, ethics, and often, mild-to-severe social anxiety. There is no other profession quite like it. The banker isn’t expected to provide catharsis. The plumber is never asked to confront the mysteries of the human condition. Nor is the accountant expected to delve into the meaning of life and give form to experiences that resist ordinary language. But the artist? The artist is expected to be part shaman, part surgeon, part time traveler, and part content creator—all while remaining romantically destitute and somehow making meaningful eye contact with strangers at exhibition openings. And yet, for all the absurdities, the role carries a profound and inescapable responsibility. Because art, when it’s at its best, isn’t decoration. It isn’t ego. It isn’t a tax write-off hanging in the conference room of a crypto investor fiftieth floor office. No—art is a medium through which we test what it means to be alive. It’s where we process the unprocessed, where we find meaning in the muck, and where we articulate what words often fail to capture. In that sense, the responsibility of the artist is not only to create—but to connect. Connect themselves with strangers, connect stranger with other strangers, and to connect strangers with something higher than all of us. And if that connection fails to materialise, if the artwork leaves the viewer untouched, unmoved, or unbothered, the blame cannot be laid at the feet of the audience. That responsibility falls squarely on the artist.

This is somewhat of a controversial but refreshing take. Blaming the artist in a world that is set on blaming the viewer for “not getting it” is a bit like walking into an avant-garde gallery wearing a T-shirt that says “Maybe Duchamp Was Just Lazy.” Which for the record, I agree with... But let’s be honest, if your work requires an interpretive Olympics or an artist’s statement longer than War and Peace, and a full course in semiotics to be understood then maybe the work itself isn’t doing enough work. Art should invite interpretation, not barricade itself behind it. It gestures cryptically, seductively, sometimes even idiotically, and it says: “Come here. Walk with me. There’s something I want to show you, but I don’t fully understand it yet either.”

To make such encounters possible; crafting work that simultaneously disorients and entices, the artist must first understand their tools. And I don’t mean pencils, pastels, brushes and chisels. I mean structure, tension, contrast, and rhythm. These are the elements that create resonance, the artist’s job is to orchestrate them in a way that feels both deliberate and instinctive. This isn’t just about what you put in the work, but how how you put it in. These details—sometimes mistakes or subtle dissonance—remind the viewer that the piece is alive, that it was made by a fallible creature with skin and breath and fear. These are the breadcrumbs through the forest, the things that stop the work from becoming a rigor mortised corpse. But choices like these don’t happen accidentally, they arise from deep intention and a willingness to listen to the work as it unfolds. They come from patience with oneself and the work—and there, my friends, lies the catch. Because if there’s one thing our current art world doesn’t have time for, it’s patience.

This is where the artist’s responsibility to the viewer enters the picture. Art is not a private diary entry that's been accidentally left open on a table, and it certainly isn’t created for the gallerist. Once a work is offered to the world, it becomes a space that others step into. The artist’s task is not to unload emotion but to build a structure sturdy enough for someone else to inhabit. That requires intention. It requires care. It requires the humility to recognise that your feelings, however powerful, are not automatically legible to others.
We are living in the great algorithmic sausage factory. Everything is metrics. Everything is content. Artists now find themselves competing not only with their contemporaries, but with cats playing piano, and influencers doing interpretive TikTok dances. You’re not only expected to produce, but to produce publicly, in real-time, with captions, behind-the-scenes footage, hashtags, and a witty story about your morning coffee. Under these conditions, art becomes fast food. It is easy to consume, but hard to remember. And here’s the thing: fast art, just like fast fashion doesn’t last. It can’t. Because enduring art is slow. It ferments. It simmers. It mutters strange things in the back of your mind while you’re trying to fall asleep. It resists clarity and refuses closure—making that kind of work takes time. It takes solitude and failure. Lots of it. The challenge, then, is not just to make meaningful work—it’s to defend the conditions under which meaningful work is possible. And that requires guts. It requires saying no to the pressure to produce for relevance. It requires choosing quality over quantity, depth over frequency, mystery over marketability. It requires creating because your brain is on fire and you have no idea why, not because the market and algorithms are hungry.

There is another responsibility of the artist that receives far less attention, perhaps because it is harder to measure. The artist is not only responsible to the viewer, but also to the question that started the work in the first place. Before there’s an audience, there’s usually a fascination. An itch that cannot be scratched. A feeling that defies explanation. Most artists begin not with certainty, but with obsession. Something captures their attention and, for reasons they cannot fully articulate, they spend years trying to understand it. The strange thing is, is that success often makes this responsibility harder to fulfil. Recognition creates noise and expectations accumulate. The artist begins producing work not because they are following a question, but because they are maintaining an carefully crafted identity. The work gradually shifts from being an act of investigation to an act of performance. This transition is subtle enough that many artists never notice it happening. They continue making technically competent work while becoming increasingly disconnected from the thing that compelled them to create in the first place. They’re making money, meeting people and finding success—so why change anything, right?

Perhaps this is why so much contemporary art feels strangely exhausted despite being endlessly innovative. We have become obsessed with novelty, as though the artist’s highest calling is to constantly invent new territory. Yet many of the most enduring artists spent their lives returning to the same handful of questions. Different forms, different materials, different approaches—but the same underlying search for mystery. They were not chasing new answers so much as deepening their relationship with an old one.
The responsibility of the artist, then, is not simply to move forward. Sometimes it’s to remember and to protect whatever fragile spark first ignited their curiosity from being buried beneath reputation, or commercial success. This requires a certain kind of honesty because the things that we are sentimental towards are rarely the things that sound impressive at family reunions or potluck dinners. More often they are embarrassingly simple; a childhood memory, a dark fantasy, a nostalgic colour, or a beautiful landscape. An image we keep returning to, or a question we cannot stop asking. These are often the wells from which the deepest work emerges.

Perhaps this is the paradox at the heart of artistic responsibility. We spend years learning techniques, building careers, growing our audiences, and expanding our understanding of the world, only to discover that the most important task may be remembering what first compelled us to begin. The artist moves outward into complexity, yet the work itself often pulls inward towards something simpler and more fundamental. Not simplistic, but simple. Beneath the layers of skill and recognition, there is usually a question that has been waiting to be answered all along. The challenge is not merely to create new work, but to recognise that question of Why? when it reappears in disguise.