On Creating Without an Audience

The following article is a cleaned up comment I made on a post by Elif Shafak.

On Creating Without an Audience

“If we had no listeners, no readers, no one to share our art with, we would be terribly lonely. We might still continue to create, yes, we probably would carry on working doggedly, but the truth is, it would not be the same… no, it wouldn’t be the same.”
— Albert Camus

I’ve thought about this many times, especially when I hear an artist say things like:
“Why should I keep making work? It’s just stacking up, and I’m out of space.”
Or, “It feels selfish to spend so much time in the studio when there are so many other things that need doing.”
Or, “People don’t appreciate what I’m doing, so I’m just going to stop. What’s the point?”

Each time I hear that, I want to ask: What are you thinking?
An artist doesn’t stop making art because others fail to respond. If you are truly an artist, you make work because you must. Because it’s the way you breathe and translate your life into meaning. Because art is how you interact and communicate with the universe itself.

But perhaps that is not the “why” for everyone. Some may be doing it for reasons that cannot sustain them when silence meets their work. Perhaps they need applause, affirmation, or market validation to keep the current flowing. When those fade, so does their motivation.

For me, the act of working has always been the way I live. It is how I process experience, how I think, how I remain whole. The response from others is a gift, yes, and I’ve been fortunate to receive a good one. Yet if it were otherwise, I believe I would continue. Maybe I would slow the pace, or shift mediums, but I could not stop.

It was always essential to me to become self-sustaining from my art - not out of pride, but because I couldn’t bear to divide my energy between the calling of creation and the demands of unrelated work. It took years to reach that point, but the commitment never wavered. The creative life was not an accessory; it was the axis around which everything else revolved.

So, do I agree with Camus? Not entirely. I understand his point - that art gains a different life when it is witnessed, that a part of the artist longs for communion. But for me, the impulse to create is older and deeper than audience. If I had no one to share with, I would still build worlds, still write, still cut and paste the fragments of thought into order. A flower still blooms, a tree still falls in the woods whether a human witnesses it or not.

But to be alone with one’s work is not to be lonely. Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

Perhaps I would work differently if I did not need to live from the proceeds. I might choose smaller scales or less resource-heavy mediums. That’s one reason collage appeals to me: small, transportable, made of what the world leaves behind. Writing too offers this simplicity - a practice requiring little more than a page and persistence.

In the end, whether there is applause or silence, the artist’s task remains the same: to stay attuned to the mysterious dialogue between the inner and outer worlds. To keep translating what passes through us into form. To keep the conversation with existence alive, even if no one seems to be listening.

Because art, at its truest and most sustaining, is the inner call and response. No audience required.

Postscript: On Time as Audience

Thinking about audience, I’m reminded that much of what artists make is not meant for their own generation. Many works never find their true audience until long after the creator is gone - sometimes not until the world itself has changed enough to understand them.

The painter in a cold studio, the poet with a drawer full of unsent words, the composer who hears what no one else can yet recognize - all of them are speaking forward in time. Their listeners may have not even be born yet. The work travels ahead like a sealed letter, waiting for the hands that can finally open it.

So perhaps Camus’ loneliness belongs only to the present moment. Because every act of creation is also a gesture toward the future, an offering into the vast unknown. Art lives across centuries. It waits patiently for response.

In that sense, the artist’s audience is not missing, only still at a distance.
And the silence around the work is not rejection, but incubation.

What matters is to keep making, to keep sending signals into the deep.
Someone, somewhere, somewhen, will hear them.

On the Weight of an Audience

There is, of course, another side to this question of audience.
For all the comfort of being seen, there is also a quiet peril in it.

Once an artist has an audience, the attention begins to bend outward. The work can become entangled with expectation. One starts to think about what they want, what they might understand, whether they will stay, or worse - turn away.

It’s a subtle corruption. The energy that once flowed inward, between the artist and the mystery, begins to leak toward approval and reception. The artist becomes self-conscious, and self-consciousness is the great enemy of creative truth.

The audience, for all their love and curiosity, can become a mirror that traps rather than reflects. We begin to measure ourselves against the reflection instead of the original impulse. We start editing the voice that once spoke freely, out of fear it might no longer please the room.

To create authentically, one must learn to both welcome and ignore the audience - to let them exist as witnesses, not as judges. The artist’s real accountability is not to applause or critique but to the integrity of their own listening. The inward ear must remain the first audience.

So yes, to be without listeners is lonely. But to be enslaved by their listening is a deeper isolation.

The secret, I think, is to keep turning back toward the source, to the trail that beckons - to the place before reception, before expectation, before the mind begins to ask who will care, who will be pleased or disappointed. That is where the real work begins and where it continues, quietly, regardless of who is watching.

On Accountability

11/16/2025 - I just reread this article and decided to add the following as an after thought.

I am recalling one of my earliest public exposures in a group exhibition, around 1982. I had invested in having one of my early collages professionally framed for the occasion, a piece I still have. Seeing my work displayed in a formal exhibition setting gave me new insights into the importance of presentation in the public sphere.

As my career developed and my work appeared more frequently, I began to observe how people responded to it. I realized that viewers bring their own issues, interests, and understandings to an artwork. They do not see it the same way the artist does. At first this felt frustrating. Later it became liberating. Since I had no control over how others would respond, I no longer needed to concern myself with shaping their interpretation. Every artwork functions like a Rorschach test. It reveals the viewer more than the thing they are looking at.

Still, with this understanding in mind, I try to shape my works so that the attentive viewer can have a satisfying experience. I keep this in mind while working. I also imagine how a piece might be seen one hundred years from now in a museum environment. I want the work to hold up under that level of institutional scrutiny and public attention.

My sense of audience is also shaped by my early research into other artists. I always sought out artists whose bodies of work were diverse enough and complex enough that I could return to them again and again and find something new. That remains a guiding influence.

So I imagine a future audience when I work. I think about how my progressions, motifs, and ideas fuse and change over time. I hope to keep improving. I want to leave a labyrinth of signs and clues for those who come later. This requires thinking of the work in an archival way across an entire lifetime, treating it all as a single, ongoing creation.

So if you do not have an audience, then just imagine one and that might actually be better than having too much public exposure. Imagine an audience of adoring fans and fascinating museum exhibitions and catalogs of your work with scholarly articles. How do you want your body of work to look in that possible future that you might never see in your lifetime? Work on that idea. Then you will be happy with the time and solitude to work it out.