The problem with the workmanly factory approach we’ve been whipped with in art school is that pouring out work after work after work in a workmanly way results in workmanly art, with high craft and little or no incident. 

You can trivialize and reduce your own work to the level of fine cabinetry in the name of discipline, of building inventory, of being there when the good stuff happens. This is most of what happens in contemporary fine art. 

People will follow you regardless. You’re the artist, after all. Your artist-ness in their eyes is the validation for your work. You grind out 50 paintings all expressing a method you refined yourself through the previous 500 paintings. And very few paintings in that 50 will be great, will stand out, will have incident. You’ve eliminated incident in the refinement of method. Now it’s the method that’s making the painting, and you have made yourself the instrument for your method. 

But your method has no ideas or thoughts. Your method doesn’t want to be interrupted. Your method is building fine cabinetry devoid of incident. Incident, after all, could foil functionality and mar finish, and we can’t have that, and everyone is accepting and affirming your fine cabinetry as art. So you accept your fine cabinetry as art, too. 

But back at the beginning, when you first were drawn to making art, you really were drawn to making art. You loved its surprises. The way the thing you made could teach you, the maker, and then you would make more and learn more and so on. And you would be surprised. Frequently. 

You didn’t want to make cabinetry, because you knew even the finest cabinetry couldn’t possibly hold the kinds of surprises art held for you. 

What seduced you into making fine cabinetry instead of art? The institution. Ruled and directed by non-artists. Chief valuer of predictability, of uniformity, of regularity. Protector and maintainer of investments. Deviser and propagator of evaluative measures.

You decided at some point in your creative development that your art making needed justification. It costs money to make it, it costs money to store it, so you reasoned that it should pay money to be justified. 

Then you decided at some point in your development that making art which is recognizable by the institution was the justification you needed for making art.

Once you gave yourself over to that thought, you finished with art and devoted yourself to the making of fine cabinetry.