This is an age when huckstering is considered a fine art.
A successful hypester is now a Wagner of marketing, a Van Gogh of persuasion.

This might be vanity or it might be deep-rooted insecurity, it’s hard to tell. It is certainly an inaccurate use of language.

But these days, counting yourself an artist is not a matter of precise definition. It is a kind of self-anointing, the kind typical of the mob mind? We live in an age where there are no priesthoods we can believe in. What could be more democratic than an order into which anyone can be inducted, with a clever turn of phrase, a dab of paint….or a long form sales letter?

You might say, so what? What if salesmen think they are painting the Sistine Chapel? What’s wrong with it?

So many things, it would be hard to know where to start.

In the first place, it reeks of envy…..

Terrific salesmen are not Michelangelos or Leonardos. It would be flattery to call them even hacks.

A salesman does a very necessary and important task. He might do it superbly. That does not make him an artist, let alone an artistic genius.

There may be novelists for whom writing is a business and salesmen for whom selling is a pleasure, but in general there is a difference between activities that have their own reasons for being (the sciences and arts) and activities that are means to those things (selling).

A great artist is not an easy thing to come by. A number of things have to get together – talent so extraordinary as to occur only once in generations… the necessary training…the proper socio-economic soil… enough physical and intellectual vitality…drive…luck…

So many things, in fact, that it isn’t really in anyone’s hands to “decide” to be an artist of that stature. If it is given to you, it will be. If it is not, it will not. Talent does what it can. Genius does what it must, as someone said.

Great art and hype are things that no person of sense, especially a sense of proportion, would confuse or think of comparing. It isn’t just arrogance but arrogant foolishness to think that selling anything, however well, is equivalent to composing the Goldberg Variations.

In fact, a sensible person would laugh at the comparison, if it were not also profoundly sad. It betrays a temperament so shallow it cannot grasp that there are limits to how we shape ourselves. Limits not set by ourselves at all, but by that formless form and ever-changing changelessness that a less self-conscious period in the West called God and the East still calls the Self.