The psychology of art is fascinating because it's a mixture of conflicting drives.
Caring about how others perceive your work helps incentivize you to get better and grind through all of the non-creative work required to get stuff in front of an audience. But it also creates anxiety that you'll be rejected by them.
Believing in yourself and the worth of your art helps overcome that anxiety and allows you to make authentic work that is personal in ways that resonate with others instead of pandering. But it also risks making you oblivious to actual useful critical feedback and can make you inflexible and unpleasant to collaborate with.
There is an interesting feedback loop between artist and audience. I think the best art comes from an artist intensely connecting with their own inner emotions in ways that reveal something meaningful and true to the audience. That level of vulnerability is difficult without external support, so it's incredibly hard to do that without an audience that it resonates with. It's like each artists needs to find their own local microclimate of the right fans in order to blossom.
Caring about how others perceive your work helps incentivize you to get better and grind through all of the non-creative work required to get stuff in front of an audience. But it also creates anxiety that you'll be rejected by them.
Believing in yourself and the worth of your art helps overcome that anxiety and allows you to make authentic work that is personal in ways that resonate with others instead of pandering. But it also risks making you oblivious to actual useful critical feedback and can make you inflexible and unpleasant to collaborate with.
There is an interesting feedback loop between artist and audience. I think the best art comes from an artist intensely connecting with their own inner emotions in ways that reveal something meaningful and true to the audience. That level of vulnerability is difficult without external support, so it's incredibly hard to do that without an audience that it resonates with. It's like each artists needs to find their own local microclimate of the right fans in order to blossom.