Walking through the Orange County Museum of Art on Thursday, trying to make heads or tails of their 2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social exhibit, I was reminded just how much I dislike art speak.
So much jargon. So much posturing. Words like “dialogue,” “intervention,” and “liminal space” tossed around as if they automatically make an artist or their work profound.
To me, that kind of language feels less like clarity and more like academic gaslighting—an elaborate system of pigeonholes where art (and artists) are neatly labeled before they are filed away.
Over the years, I’ve collected plenty of labels myself: costumer, graphic designer, photographer, art director, and creative director. Some were job titles, others were polite guesses at whatever I happened to be doing at the time. But none of them ever felt like me. I wasn’t “being” a thing. I was just creating and collaborating.
Once upon a time, a colleague called me a “multidisciplinary artist.” While technically accurate, it sounded pretentious as hell—like I was wearing a rainbow velvet blazer with elbow patches made of glitter. Cute but not my style.
For better and/or worse, I’ve spent most of my life resisting the pressure to be categorized…or consistent. The rebel in me prefers to do what I do when I do it.
In marketing, consistency helps build a brand. In academia, it helps establish a discipline. In the art world, it helps reassure collectors and curators they will be getting “more of the same.”
But even when my work might look like repetition, behind the scenes I’m approaching subjects in different ways.
The thought of fully repeating myself—hammering away at one style or medium until it calcifies into a “signature”—makes me itchy. And scratchy too.
My creativity and curiosity don’t move in straight lines. They zig, zag, double back, and sometimes go completely off the rails.
Consistency may comfort institutions, but it rarely sparks interesting work. Creativity, at least for me, is a rebellion against predictability. It’s about testing edges, following tangents, and refusing to settle into a category someone else has defined.
So when I hear jargon-heavy attempts to box artists into movements or theories, I can’t help but push back and roll my eyes. Art isn’t a brand deck or a thesis. It’s a messy, human, sometimes contradictory impulse to make sense of the world—or at least to make something in spite of it.
If that makes me “inconsistent,” I’ll wear that label loudly and proudly.
Consistency is overrated. Creativity and curiosity are not.
Keep calm and create on!
Clint 🌈✌️
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Loved this. Messy, human creativity > neat categories any day. Labels and jargon can guide us, but the magic happens in the zig-zags, the liminal spaces we actually live in rather than just talk about.
Thomas Wolfe wrote a book (hilarious, I might add), entitled "The Painted Word" which speaks to exactly what you have written about here. Yes, there are other agendas in that work, but that's certainly one of them. What you say is very fine. Example: William Butler Yeats was---what? A poet, certainly. A playwright, a political activist, an occultist, a lover, a husband, a critic, a mentor and friend to people he disagreed with (Ezra Pound, anyone?). Sounds a lot like you in many ways.