The number of people producing art has never been higher and with everybody including your aunt trying to sell their work and get exhibited, only the best actually manage to do so in the end.

But the issue with art is that beauty is incredibly subjective and there are more concepts and ideas than there are beliefs in the world, so defining the best people in the art business is incomparably harder to do than finding the winners of any sports competition.

While many factors are absolutely subjective and ambivalent, there are a few objective methods to discern quality, and today I want to talk about one that I find to be one of the more important ones: a consistent personal narrative.

One could argue that connections are more important — and I have to agree with this — they aren’t always under our control, because there are a bunch of factors that make up the quality and quantity of our network, that we have no influence upon:

Some are born into a well connected family and others may live in giant cities, so finding likeminded people is much easier than if you live on a farm somewhere in the Alps — where the only connection you can go looking for is in the shape of a bar of signal on your cellphone.

But anyone can evolve a core narrative and it can only come from within — and as such we have full control over it, regardless of our background or where we started out.

To define our story is to define how our work as a whole differs from anybody else’s, and this can mean many things: 

We could think about focusing on one particular topic, one particular message that we communicate with all of our work. Similar to brands — when they focus on one basic message, like Nike’s famous: “Just do it” campaign — we should have a core narrative that connects all of our work.

If you look at Damien Hirst’s body of work for example, even though his art pieces vary in style, technique and medium immensely, the message stays the same: I’m a pompous prick who is afraid to die, so I project my fears on unsuspecting animals and objects and make you feel like I am God himself by employing art majors to paint colourful dots and catch butterflies for my friend Larry. 

Or something like this, at least.

It doesn’t matter if you only create one type of art and build your narrative on being an expert landscape painter or if you follow a certain topic and use whatever materials that best serve your needs. Each of us should have our own core narrative well defined, because it helps connect all of our works into one coherent body.

Not only does this help differentiate our work from anybody else’s, but it can act as a guiding light for anything we do; in the end, having a core narrative isn’t much different from having a purpose, and without either, life just gets messy over time.