"Everyone wants immediate success, immediate celebrity, and that doesn't produce what used to be artists"
About this Quote
A small complaint that lands like an indictment of an era: the demand for speed doesn’t just change how careers unfold, it changes what kind of person gets called an artist. Davis frames “immediate success” and “immediate celebrity” as twin temptations that hijack the long, quiet process where craft is actually made. The phrasing is blunt, almost weary; “everyone” is exaggeration with a purpose, the rhetorical move that signals he’s talking less about individuals than about a prevailing cultural weather system.
The bite is in “doesn’t produce what used to be artists.” He isn’t merely nostalgic for some golden age of genius. He’s pointing to incentives. When the reward structure is instant visibility, the work tilts toward what can be quickly legible, quickly shared, quickly branded. Celebrity becomes not a byproduct of making something good, but the thing being manufactured. In that economy, apprenticeship looks like wasted time; patience reads as irrelevance.
“Used to be” is doing quiet work, too: it suggests a shift from artist as maker to artist as content pipeline, from a life organized around mastery to a life organized around attention management. The line also hints at a loss of risk. Artists, historically, could fail privately for years; their audience arrived late. Today the audience arrives early, and early audiences tend to reward familiarity and punish experiments that don’t fit a feed.
Even without knowing Davis’s field, the quote feels like it comes from someone who watched standards get replaced by metrics. It’s less moralizing than diagnostic: a culture that can’t wait long enough for art ends up with something faster, shinier, and thinner.
The bite is in “doesn’t produce what used to be artists.” He isn’t merely nostalgic for some golden age of genius. He’s pointing to incentives. When the reward structure is instant visibility, the work tilts toward what can be quickly legible, quickly shared, quickly branded. Celebrity becomes not a byproduct of making something good, but the thing being manufactured. In that economy, apprenticeship looks like wasted time; patience reads as irrelevance.
“Used to be” is doing quiet work, too: it suggests a shift from artist as maker to artist as content pipeline, from a life organized around mastery to a life organized around attention management. The line also hints at a loss of risk. Artists, historically, could fail privately for years; their audience arrived late. Today the audience arrives early, and early audiences tend to reward familiarity and punish experiments that don’t fit a feed.
Even without knowing Davis’s field, the quote feels like it comes from someone who watched standards get replaced by metrics. It’s less moralizing than diagnostic: a culture that can’t wait long enough for art ends up with something faster, shinier, and thinner.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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