The Weight of Influence and the Myth of Artistic Freedom
To be an artist is to carry weight. There’s the weight of those who taught you, the weight of history, the weight of expectation, whether from institutions, peers or the world at large. Even the idea of "breaking free" suggests something to break from. But is total freedom in art even possible? Or is it just another illusion, another framework in which artists believe they are making choices but are, in reality, following invisible paths laid before them?
The Classroom and the Closed Circuit
In the halls of art schools, where the intention is to liberate, something else happens. A kind of osmosis occurs. An unspoken language forms between students and their tutors, not just in what is explicitly taught but in what is implicitly understood. It is not just techniques being passed down but a way of seeing. The lecturers, having once been students themselves, are part of a lineage. Their own influences are absorbed into the next generation and through the revolving doors of visiting lectureships, these ideas begin to crystallise into a kind of doctrine.
It’s not intentional. No one sets out to create an echo chamber. But soon, artists trained within these institutions emerge speaking the same language, drawing from the same well, reacting to the same stimuli. Is this education or is it indoctrination in disguise? If all doors lead to the same corridor, does it matter which one you walk through?
The Marketplace and the Open Field
Then there is the other path, the artist who steps outside, away from the institution, away from the approval of mentors. In the wider world, the rules are different. The conversation is no longer confined to a seminar room but dictated by those who buy, those who commission, those who engage. Here, freedom looks different. It is not about breaking from academic constraints but about navigating visibility, sustainability and resonance.
Without an institution’s validation, an artist’s work must find its own legs. It is judged not by whether it fits into a theoretical framework but by something far more unpredictable : how it moves people, how it exists in the world, how it endures. But does this create another kind of limitation? Does the necessity of survival, of commercial success, force the artist into another mould, one where the desire to be seen, to be understood, to be valued, shapes the work just as powerfully as any tutor’s critique?
The Illusion of Total Freedom
Perhaps freedom, as we imagine it, does not exist. Perhaps no artist is truly free, because art itself is an act of connection, a reaching out, whether to history, to an audience or to an internal logic that is shaped by everything the artist has ever seen, known or felt.
Maybe the question is not how an artist finds freedom, but how they navigate its absence.
Some artists lean into the currents of influence, accepting that they are part of something larger. Others fight against them, carving out space in the cracks between established ideas. And some, perhaps the most interesting of all, find a way to dance between the two, aware of the forces at play but refusing to be defined by them.
So where does the artist go from here? If every step is taken on ground already trodden, does that make the journey less worthwhile? Or does it mean that true artistic freedom is not about breaking free from influence but about understanding it, choosing which threads to weave into one's own work, and knowing that even in the most original creation, there are echoes of everything that came before?