Paris Hilton has quite an art collection, but one of the more curious art pieces in her home is a work by Terry Richardson called the Paparazzi Machine. For anyone who doesn’t know what the artwork looks like, but doesn’t want to Google it, it’s a big print, filled with photographers holding their cameras, flashing directly into the viewer. It even has a button, where you can turn on the flash sounds and lights, built into the work.

For almost everybody such a work would be of zero value, both monetarily and emotionally speaking; no-one knows what being followed by hundreds of photographers on a daily basis feels like, no-one has any real idea what it means to have no privacy (be it something she intended or just something that happened to her), but for people like Paris Hilton, who has probably been followed by paparazzis almost (if not) everyday of the week since her 16th or 17th birthday, this work speaks to her directly.

She feels a strong emotional connection to it, pleasant and horrifying at the same time. She connects with the motif, the work represents her life (or at least one of the more prominent features of it) directly and offers it to her in form of a glorified altar; distant enough to be observed without repercussions of being directly exposed to these vultures of the photography world, but real enough to still have an impact on her every time she sees it.

I wonder how many times I have had the pleasure of knowing one of my works was going to someone as perfect of a fit as Paris is for Richardson’s work. And it does make me think if I am also really thinking about who such a fit would actually be; What does she like? What makes her tick? What does she value most in her life, so that having an “altar” of it on her wall would feel natural, or even necessary to her?

While creating for such needs explicitly is another topic – if for no other reason than just the question of producing genuine art – what about after we finish a work? Do we really take our time and study what we made? And do we do our due diligence to find the right people who would not only like, but need something like this in their life?

I cannot say what a collector Paris is, but the one thing I am sure is that whatever her taste and intellectual preference, she doesn’t need any if she is presented with a work of art that fits her personality and her lifestyle like a glove she never knew she wanted. Because our job as creatives isn’t just to create and to bring new stuff into the world, but to find the right ears, the right eyes that wish or even need to experience what we have to offer.

Because you could be making the most wonderful umbrellas the world has ever seen, but if you decide sell them in the Atacama dessert, you might just start believing that no-one needs and umbrella, while the guy in front of Notre Dame sells hundreds of cheap chines-made ones to tourists, the second it starts to rain in Paris.