Predictability Kills

July 26, 2025

Predictability kills. It's the slow, quiet death of art, an erosion of vitality that begins not with failure, but with success. When something works, when a painting sells, a style gets recognized, the world leans in and asks for more of the same. And at first, the repetition feels like validation. There’s comfort in being wanted, in being understood, in knowing how to deliver what people expect. But then comes the trap: expectation becomes demand, demand becomes pressure, and pressure breeds predictability. What once pulsed with risk and rawness now settles into a template. The spark dims. The work may still look good, even sell well, but it’s hollow. Safe. Formulaic.

Art is meant to disturb, to provoke, to excite, not to soothe audiences with familiar rhythms. When we, as artists, fall into predictable patterns, we lose the edge that made the work powerful in the first place. It's a paradox: the very thing that gives art its staying power, its capacity to surprise, is what the market most often tries to tame. But if you're not a little bit scared by what you're making, if you're not stretching, failing, reaching beyond your current self, then you're not creating, you're producing. And there's a difference.

This is why, no matter how tempting it is to stay in the lane that brought recognition, we have to break our own molds. Disrupt our own systems. Shift mediums, invert perspectives, pursue the weird, the uncertain, the unfamiliar. Growth doesn’t come from comfort, it comes from confrontation. From the willingness to be misunderstood. From the audacity to abandon what worked in favor of what might not.

The truth is, art is a living thing. It needs friction. It needs the tension of the unknown. When we start making only what we know we can do, the soul drains out of the process. The risk disappears, and with it, the joy. So fight predictability like a sickness. Step off the well-worn path, not because the world wants you to, but because your creative self depends on it. Keep changing. Keep ruining your old formulas. Keep moving forward into the messy, unpredictable wild. That’s where the real work lives.