Authority


How more success you have, how more people will look up to you. Isn’t that what we all want, secretly, somehow? That people look up to us? They will certainly take us seriously, finally.

As most artists, you probably have had periods too that you wanted to belong to the group (at school, in the neighborhood, at work) but didn’t fit in. These are very lonely times. Often you provoke authority in that periods too, you don’t want to adapt to how others think you should be, you want to discover who you really are, you want to go your own way. And every piece of art, music, painting reflects your own perspective on the world.

Of course, you have to deal with limitations too. But as artist you don’t assimilate, by definition, you look for your own way and bend the limitations in your art. Authorities will always see your behavior as obscure, dangerous and subversive.

This is what the artist Arturo in the international TV series The Spiral means when saying: “The authorities don’t want us all to be artists, that is: people who go their own way.”

But what if you suddenly become an authority yourself because you have success, because you are famous? How do you deal with that? How more successful you get, how more people will try to adapt to you and your behavior. The only answer I can find to that is: keep looking for your own way. Don’t follow the crowd, not even the guru’s or prophets. The best advise I’ve seen to deal with it is in an old Buddhist saying:

“Don’t walk in foodsteps of the masters, search what they were searching for.”

The Spiral: http://www.thespiraltheseries.com/

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