Margins of Life

The Chameleon Artist

A few days ago, a client commissioned a private artwork from me. She then posted it publicly alongside pieces she had commissioned from several other artists. The artworks were numbered 1–5, each with a price tag, and a caption asking: is it worth the price? Mine was the most expensive — roughly three times the price of the others.

The post immediately went viral. When I first saw it, it already had around 700 comments, and the crowd had picked an obvious loser: #3, which was mine. A few hours later I checked again, and the comment count had climbed to around 1,000, all criticizing my work.

I read through the comment section, and it would be a blatant lie to say I felt nothing. I did feel a flicker of annoyance, as most humans might, but it was gone almost as soon as it arrived. What stayed with me wasn’t the comments at all, but rather how people relate to art, value, and their own judgment.

As a trained artist, I’m used to receiving critiques. Usually, art critiques from the public follow a familiar pattern: “lack of fundamentals,” “wrong perspective,” “weird composition,” et cetera — and I’ve received them all. For my art specifically, there’s something unique: “not enough detail in the rendering.” These are the very standard charges. They sound technical enough to come from trained eyes (and sometimes they do — from art school students or young industry artists), and they’re almost impossible to argue with because they’re vague enough to mean anything.

They’re also, mostly, learned phrases. They get repeated every day because they signal taste and training, without the person saying them actually seeing the art itself. “Bad fundamentals” is the art-world equivalent of saying someone has bad vibes: it’s a technical word that sounds like a diagnosis, but boiled down, it’s really just a feeling. Most art enjoyers don’t walk into the Van Gogh Museum and laugh at the art for lack of fundamentals (well, maybe you do).

I’m very familiar with these charges, because I’ve heard these exact words cast at me before, countless times. When I was learning art, other students would sometimes pull up works from artists on the market and critique them — and sometimes that work was mine (since I always posted under an alias, no one ever knew it was from me). And guess what? I got: “Fundamentals are off, perspective is wrong,” and mostly, “Never enough detail! Obviously no effort in it at all.” Then the students started wondering why on earth anyone would pay for a piece of trash — the conclusion being that the mass audience had no art taste at all, and the artist (a.k.a. me) was just adapting to a popular vibe. Sometimes the discussion got very heated, and a few emotional students would actually cry from it.

But most of the time, I’d just sit there and listen, occasionally nodding along to some, even adding my own critiques to the pile when I felt like it. I always find it funny to watch people perform expertise, particularly when it’s on me, and to know quietly that, maybe, I was the only one in the room feeling that detached. That’s the strange freedom of being the invisible subject of a critique — like sneaking into the backstage of people’s inner world. Nobody’s actually talking to you or your work. They’re, in fact, using your work as a prop to talk with each other.

Given the aforementioned experience, when the 700 comments arrived, I reacted the way I had countless times before — I read them all with a detached interest. What was funny this time was that I later found the client herself in the comments, too. She was responding to the comments one by one, liking all the counter-arguments, and sometimes defending the work herself. I remember she wrote something like: “It is a very advanced technique! If you’re looking for perfection, you’d have to commission Claude Monet himself.”

Which is a lovely instinct, because Monet’s works are actually my major source of inspiration. But as someone who’s studied Monet seriously for years, I have to say: Monet has obvious errors too. His perspectives are often off, and his fundamentals are very loose. Even the colors — what he was famous for — could use improvement sometimes, given his average skill level. And above all, none of his pieces are detailed at all.

Impression Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872. Would you say all the ships follow a unified “correct” perspective?

Nevertheless, the client reached for the one example that actually proved the commenters wrong, without quite realizing why. The people demanding detail and correct perspective are demanding something Monet never gave (and never intended to give). The value of a Monet piece was never in its correctness. This is where art itself gets interesting, because the crowd’s criterion — detail, effort, correctness — is the one criterion that has almost nothing to do with why people love it.

Detail is measurable; that’s why some people reach for it. When you can’t perceive what a piece is doing, you count what’s measurable: how many hours, how much rendering, and eventually how many dollars. It converts an aesthetic question into an arithmetic — or financial — one, which is much easier to answer. “Not enough detail” really means “I can’t see the value, so I’m going to measure the labor instead.”

But effort is not value. Sometimes a piece can be labored over and still look soulless (you all know what I mean when you see certain industry art — or even the AI-generated ones), and sometimes a piece can be made in 10 minutes and feel alive (see those doodles on X reposted a hundred thousand times). What people respond to in art is whether something lands in them, whether the artist translated their feelings successfully into a visual piece.

That’s not publicly measurable, which is exactly why the crowd ignores it — and why criticism never touches me. The reason I could watch this unfold without being wounded is that I don’t need the crowd to hold my confidence up. The same dynamic that would shake a lot of artists only left me with a quiet recognition: I know what it is to trust the “translation of feeling,” because that, rather than art “fundamentals,” is my real job.

It might sound like superiority, because sometimes confidence itself sounds offensive to someone who lacks it. But the point here is this: there are two ways of holding a judgment — one that lives inside you, and one that needs an audience to exist. I know the difference between them, and I confidently live in the space between.

Living in the Translation

There’s a way of thinking about poem, art, or anything aesthetical — one that’s been around for a long time, and it’s the closest thing I have to a description of how I work. John Keats, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 Oct. 1818) , described what he called the “chameleon poet”:

“As to the poetical Character itself… it is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing… A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body.”

In my own words: poets have no fixed self to assert. They dissolve into whatever they create, translating a feeling into words without putting any colored lenses between the words and emotional reality. Keats framed this against Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” — Wordsworth being the type of poet who keeps nudging you toward his own ego. Keats, the chameleon poet, does the opposite: they don’t put themselves into the work, but simply let the work pass through them.

I won’t judge who’s right or wrong, because both types clearly exist. Nowadays — and perhaps in the past as well — the Wordsworth type seems to get more recognition. The trendy writers and artists you might know become trendy precisely because they have a clear ego; when put into words or visual art, it becomes a specific style. If the style catches you, you willingly surrender to their charisma — for a while. But as the information age arrives, poetry, art, or anything aesthetic spreads far faster than before, and also becomes far easier to imitate and just as easy to exhaust. When people see something too frequently, they quickly get overstimulated and lose interest. That’s why, in an era of exploding information, it’s so rare to find masters whose work can hold you for centuries the way it did in the old times.

The Chameleon artists, though, are different. They have no fixed self, and thus no fixed stylization. What makes them special is the ability to translate — to go deeper into emotions and just… hold them there, without judgment, and translate them faithfully into a given medium. This ability to see, feel, and express all that subtlety — or the capacity to hold contradicting emotions and hostility — requires a unique type of personality. It requires the creator to have a fully functional concept of “self,” so they can dive into other feelings without drowning in them.

It’s definitely not as easy as it sounds. The difficult part is that you can’t truly see someone if you’re busy being someone. To become a Chameleon artist, you have to first release the “self” concept you’ve spent your whole life defending. But if you’ve been there, you’ll see it worth the effort: this is an irreplaceable ability, and it will never go “outdated,” because as long as humans exist, the need to be seen by another human is also eternal.

This is quite a radical stance, and obviously it has a philosophical lineage — I didn’t come up with it all by myself.  Edmund Husserl built his whole philosophy on a single insight: Consciousness is always directed at an object, whether a meaning or a person. He called this intentionality: the mind is not a container full of contents, but an activity that reaches outward.

The radical part is what this does to the “self.” If consciousness is about directedness, then the “self” isn’t a thing you have, but the activity of directing. Husserl distinguished between the empirical ego (your personality, memories, preferences — everything that gets judged) and the transcendental ego (the pure subject that performs the acts of awareness). The empirical ego is one object among many in the world, able to be judged and ranked. The transcendental ego is the one doing the judging. When I say “I live in the translation,” what I mean is: I’m not expressing my empirical ego, but only operating my transcendental ego to direct my awareness toward someone else’s need. Thus, I never get judged or ranked, and I never judge or rank someone else — because my empirical ego isn’t there.

Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist, arrived at something similar from a different perspective. His “fully functioning person” is someone who’s open to experience, unblocked by the internalized rules about what you must be in order to be acceptable. For Rogers, the healthy “self” is congruent: the self-concept matches the actual experience. The key is that congruence doesn’t have to have a fixed identity to defend. It has nothing to do with your social status, moral stance, ideology, or any other external idea. It’s about the process of letting your life experience flow through you, without distorting yourself to fit an image. He described the fully functioning person as having “organismic trusting”: a confidence in one’s own felt sense of what is right, prior to any external validation.

These two ideas particularly describe how I work. When I get an art commission, I observe, analyze, and eventually feel the client’s emotional need, and I inhabit it fully enough to render it into visual art. Art skills are a tool I happen to have, not really the thing I’m selling. What I am selling is my effort to see, understand, and express.

Therefore, the value of my art piece doesn’t lie in public opinion, but in the creative process. The impact of being seen — once you have it — is non-transitional and non-conditional. To put it more simply: I’m selling a mental experience.

About the Client

Usually, inviting critiques on someone else’s behalf, or giving critiques without clear permission, is considered against general etiquette in the art world. But I want to be careful here: judging with “should” or “should not” would easily make my client the villain, and I don’t think she is. She posted the art and invited comments, then spent the whole night — it was around 4 a.m. when I saw that post — responding to nearly every critique. At some point, she even subtly complained that people were being too harsh.

That’s a lot of effort from her side, and that effort is the interesting part. It suggests she felt something in the artworks but couldn’t quite put it into words, and thus had no framework for trusting it. So she did something most of us would do: reached for external confirmation when the internal kind felt too flimsy to stand on. This is very human, and I don’t say it as stupidity or bad faith. When people criticized the art she commissioned, she might have felt a bit hurt on her own behalf, but in the end she trusted her gut and tried to defend herself in the only arena available to her: the comment section.

Still, since she had no framework to describe this vague “feeling” that the public could agree upon, she was at a disadvantage in the fight. So when she reached for an argument, she reached for an art authority — Claude Monet — to strengthen her stand. Her instinct was right, even if the argument underneath it might be more complicated than she knew. Here again, both Monet and I were only the prop, the vessel, of her emotions.

I’ve had a similar encounter before, but in a very different context. I used to write a lot, and there was one fiction I wrote about pain. After finishing it, I posted it publicly. A commenter wrote a long reply about how the way I’d written it was “offensive,” how nothing in the story felt correct or justified. I defended myself, saying that I’d written it exactly as I felt it, and as how things could have been, referring to research papers and documentaries.

They replied: “Did you even read my comment? I said … and … are not justified. The way you wrote it is offensive.” 

And I answered: “Yes, I read your comment very carefully. But what I see and what I care about, is you.”

Maybe that set them off, because in the next comment they started attacking me personally. And if I’m being completely honest, I half-expected it. It’s strange: sometimes people want to express themselves through an opinion, but get irritated when they feel seen, or when someone actively tries to see them. The critique was a shield. I stepped around it to see the person behind, and the shield stopped working. So they reached for the next available thing, which was anger.

I don’t write this to pathologize anyone, but I see the same pattern as in the comment section of the art post. Both times, someone converted a feeling into a judgment, because a judgment can be defended and a feeling can’t. Both times, I refused to argue about the object. And both times, the refusal to play the game was read as hostile or as an invitation for more judgment — even though, to me, it was closer to the opposite.

Both my client and this past commenter posted something, hoping someone else — the crowd, or I — would tell them what to feel. But when I watched them, I knew that, mostly, we all have already got what we were looking for.