In my experience, the best guardians of quality are often true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool artists. They’re storytellers, in love with color and language and form; they feel early, often, and deeply, and their drive to communicate truth and beauty with precision is consuming.
Successful guardians of quality at Steyer have, at least on some level, bought in to the idea of applying their artistic souls and skills to the task of creating for paying clients, to their specifications, and often to sell the client’s products or services in some fashion. Those in leadership roles have taken it a step further away from pure artistic expression: they’re not only creating in a commercial context, but they’re spending additional time and precious life energy to manage other artists (a special kind of hell, unless you—like many of us at Steyer—actually like that sort of thing).
My path, as an example: at some point in my career, I made the decision to focus the lion’s share of my own storyteller talents on commercial work (and then people management and growing a business), rather than continue writing long feature articles about rappers for magazines, as I had been doing for years. At first, it was an easy decision. I didn’t want to be barely scraping by, financially. I wanted to be able to afford both groceries AND medical care, and I wanted to be able to support a family. When my bills were all paid and I was out of survival mode, though, I had an unexpectedly agonizing amount of breathing room to reassess. Did I sell out? What about art for art’s sake? Here’s where I came out, and where I’ve come out so far every time I stop to consider my own quite commercial path:
I believe artists—guardians of quality—can find deep meaning and gratification working in a commercial, for-profit context, but a few things must be true.
- The artist must, as much as is possible in our economy, freely choose—and keep choosing—to deploy their talents in a commercial context. This, btw, is the point I think I’ll get the most push-back on, because #latestagecapitalism. But even acknowledging the many real challenges to achieving middle-class financial security (e.g. housing prices, student loans, childcare, healthcare), the fact remains: it is still possible to choose, sans resentment, to develop content in a business context just as much as it is possible to choose, sans resentment, to become, say, an electrician.
- The artist must, at a profound level, desire and even relish (at least on on most days) the reward of client satisfaction. It helps if you thrill to puzzles and have a competitive spirit.
- The artist must fully understand, celebrate, and seek out their counterparts—sales people and solutions people—as equal and essential partners. This is business, after all (a group project!), and the artist is no more sacred in a commercial context than someone who can, say, negotiate a rock-solid deal.
- The artist must be willing and eager to embrace new tools and platforms and change up approaches and mediums as demanded by a competitive marketplace.
None of these are easy, or even intuitive. For many artists, at least one if not all four are deal-breakers. If they’re deal-breakers for you, I deeply understand. It may be a matter of soul preservation for you, as it is for many of my friends and professional contacts, to find paid work that does not require you to tap so deeply into your creative talents and to pursue your art just for art’s sake. But if you are an artist who can look deeply within and, at least most of the time, find your heart of hearts able to say yes to these frameworks, you might just be a Steyer-style guardian of quality.
If so, let’s connect: you can email me directly at kreilly@steyer.net. Even if we don’t have the right opening for you at the moment, I’d love to be on your radar, and vice versa.
Photo by Sajjad Ahmadi on Unsplash