Going Upstream

August 22, 2025

There’s a quiet but persistent pressure that hums beneath the surface of the art world, a pressure to conform, to follow, to smooth out your edges so you can be more digestible, more marketable, more palatable to the masses. It doesn’t announce itself as such. It comes dressed as advice, trend forecasts, best practices, and algorithms. It whispers: do more like that, this is what’s selling, look how they’re doing it. And before you know it, you’re drifting. Maybe just a little at first. Just enough to feel like you're staying current, or getting noticed. Just enough to feel safe.

But here’s the truth no one really wants to say out loud: artists don’t belong in the current.

Swimming upstream is not just an act of rebellion, it’s survival. It’s the only real option for anyone making work that matters. Because to follow the prevailing opinions, to mimic what’s popular or what’s already been accepted, is to gradually chip away at the very thing that made you pick up the brush in the first place. It may get you applause, it may get you sales for a while, but it won’t get you remembered. And worse, it won’t feel like you.

The irony is that artists are constantly told to be original, but subtly punished when they truly are. Because originality makes people uncomfortable. It asks something of them. It doesn’t slip neatly into categories or hashtags. It demands time and space and sometimes confusion. And yet, the only works that have ever shaped culture, bent perception, or cracked open new ways of seeing the world were made by those who said no, not out of stubbornness, but out of necessity.

You’re not here to decorate sameness. You’re not here to ride waves, you’re here to create rifts. To challenge the water until it changes direction. So when the pressure mounts to make your work look like what’s already out there, or to post like they post, or to say what you’re “supposed” to say, pause. Take a breath. And remember that your job is not to follow the path. Your job is to cut one.

That doesn’t mean you’ll always be understood. It doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. Swimming upstream never is. But it’s the only way to avoid being lost in the shuffle. To protect what makes your work unique. And if what you’re making is truly original, why would you try to fit it into the same mold as everything else? That mold was never built for you.

Let it crack. Let it break. Let it make room for something that’s never been seen before.