An artist I follow on Instagram mentioned offhand how she tends to get bored with one medium and flip to another. And I thought, “Yeah, me too,” although I’m not sure with me the word boredom fits, and sometimes with me it’s changing formats and entire categories of painting as well.

This isn’t some kind of childish, petulant impatience. In both cases we’re talking lifetime artists with giant bodies of work behind them.

I can’t speak for my Instagram follow, but the need to change anything comes to me as organically as waking up to another day, or looking at the menu of a restaurant I frequent and choosing something else.

Concepts play out over time and come to their ends. I’ve experienced this dozens of times by now. At these times I know deep in the core of my being, like I know my own name, that it’s time to move on. Thankfully there’s never an end of things to move on to.

These organic movements within our existences are as valid as the initial drive to make art. We’re encouraged to defy them to maintain an overtly obvious veneer of marketable consistency to the institution, in spite of consistency still being present if less-obviously so, and in spite of the indifference of the institution.

But, to me, it seems perverse to do so. To bend art toward institutional expedience.

The institution was built for art, not the other way around. In spite of what institutional gatekeepers would like you to believe.