Pursuing Fame, Fortune
Lorin Labardee
Exposure to the internet can convince anyone that fame and fortune is nothing more than a low fruit awaiting our grasp. According to Forbes magazine, 8-year-old Ryan Kaji, a world renowned Youtube toy reviewer, generated $22 million in revenue in a single year from his YouTube channel. I’ve learned for myself that fame is a fruit that’s never what it seems. And yet I lust. For this artist, fame seems to promise the ultimate remedy for what ails my soul and credit score--happiness and money.
I first encountered the photographer Bill Owens while browsing “Photography : A Handbook of History, Materials and Processes,” my Intro to Photography text. Owens’ work documenting suburban America was represented there by the image, “ Sex from Suburbia, 1972 “ The scene shows a causal couple perched on the edge of thier rumpled bed. She’s in panties and topless, he wears boxers, a tank top and black socks. The image is captioned, “We feel most people have the wrong attitude about sex, that it's nasty and to be only in the dark. With us sex takes care of itself.” A print of this image is in photography collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions. Owens received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 for his work in photography. He has published 10 books of his photography.
Etherton Gallery in Tucson Arizona recently mounted a group show, “American Stories, David Hurn, David Graham, Bill Owens” that included some of Owens most iconic images. It was there I came upon an interview with Owens in a copy of Black and White magazine. The author’s note on Owens’ perception of fame stood out, “...despite his creative successes...Owens never quite found the acceptance he yearned for.” According to the International Center for Photography Owens began drifting from photography in the 1970's, “after failing to find a publisher for his fourth book.” And took up beer making.
According to David Best in the Black & White article, Owens, meeting with financial difficulty, trouble in his marriage and with small children to care for plowed all his efforts into homebrewing. He eventually established Buffalo Bill’s Brewery and published American Brewer magazine, a specialty publication for beer brewers. Owens was quoted as claiming, “I'm even bigger in brewing than I am in the art world.” Reading those lines I was incredulous that a photographer of Owens stature failed to be satisfied with his accomplishments in the art world. In hindsight, I think it's possible Owens simply found beer making more profitable than making art and happily transferred his talents and energy to a new interest. His attachment to fame wasn’t limited an elitist pantheon of visual culture, he happily accepted a new realm and revelled in the opportunity to shine their too and feed his family.
Anne Lamott, a bestselling author and a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship has this to say about success and fame in her book “Almost Everything, Notes on Hope.” From her perspective as an author, she writes, “...publishing will (not) make you the person you always wanted to be.” A songwriter friend, Lamott says, told her his Oscar win gave him just, “...one day of self esteem and satisfaction.” Fame and success, Lamott tells the reader, is a sad and misbegotten fix for, “...all the Swiss cheesy holes in your soul.”
“A songwriter friend told (Anne) Lamott his Oscar win gave him just, “...one day of self esteem and satisfaction.”
”Almost Everything: Notes on Hope,” Anne Lamott, 2018”
Following Lamott’s path, a more certain way to satisfaction and happiness might be the cultivation of gratitude and contentment (rather than chasing after what you perceive others have and enjoy). “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking,the whole world belongs to you,” wrote Lao Tzu. Over two millennia later, research seems to bear out the legendary Lao Tzu’s admonitions.
Dan Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, has spent his career studying affective forecasting, how people imagine they will feel at a future point in time. Gilbert cites research showing, “By far the most common error is the impact bias, the tendency to overestimate the enduring impact that future events will have on our emotional reactions.” Writing in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology in 2003 Gilbert, with co-author Timothy D. Wilson, cites earlier research by other scholars showing how college football fans frequently overestimated their happiness the day after a big win. “Fans might have correctly predicted exactly how happy they were immediately after the game, but have been wrong about
how long this feeling would last, according to a study by Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, and Axsom in 2000.
Forever I’ve wanted to be accepted to the Arizona Biennial, a juried exhibition of artists from Arizona curated by the Tucson Museum of Art. I imagine the roster of past participants as a who’s who of the very most successful artists in the state. Since at least 2000 when I sent in my first application I knew all good things: fame, fortune and self respect would flow from an acceptance letter. I’m still applying, still waiting, still certain. I’m choosing, for now, to ignore scientific research.
Dr. Paul Bloom of Yale University in his Psychology 101 lecture, “The Good Life: Happiness” says this about income, wealth and the acquisition they make possible versus contentment, “The purchase of consumer goods, an X box 360, a nice flat screen TV make you very happy when you open the package and set it up but this happiness fades almost immediately.
Echoing Gilbert’s research, Bloom says a lot of the things in life you think will make you happy don't have a day to day impact on your happiness. As an example, Bloom describes how he is presently without a Nobel Prize and he’s used to that but...were he to receive a Nobel prize he’d suddenly be happy and then he would adapt, get used to the prize and go back to the same level of happiness he experienced before acquiring Nobel fame. He describes this effect as the “hedonic treadmill...you keep on running but no matter how fast you run, you stay where you are, (you experience) habituation, you get used to it.”
I have a friend who says something similar about new found fame and wealth, “Same problems, different scenery.” From John Stuart Mill comes the most useful advice I’ve found for surviving as an artist making work for little money and less fame, “I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.” Today I find I simply crave the daily opportunity to work in my studio and experience the love of making things.
Were fame and fortune my motivation I’d have stopped giving myself the joy of creating many years, five studios and two states ago. Appropriating A.A. Milne I think, “Enough is already here, there is no more out there.”