How to Be an Artist

According to David Bowie.

David Bowie said something in a 2003 interview that has stayed with me. He was asked about his own work, why he constantly changed style, why he reinvented himself. His answer was not what you would expect. He said something like: "I am not first and foremost a singer. I am a storyteller. And the instrument of that is music."

This seems simple, but it decentralizes everything. For many artists, technique is central. You are a painter, so you refine your brushwork. You are a composer, so you deepen your harmonic possibilities. But Bowie said essentially: technique is secondary. It is about what you tell.

From this follows that you need an enormous amount of material. You cannot tell the same story twice. That is why Bowie constantly changes. Ziggy Stardust is a different story than Aladdin Sane, which is different than Station to Station. Each change is not arbitrary. It is necessary.

This also has implications for truth. An artist tells stories, not facts. An autobiographical painting by Frida Kahlo conveys truth in a way no documentary can. But it is truth filtered through storytelling. It is selected, composed, arranged. That does not make it untrue, but it makes clear that you are looking at artwork, not a note.

Much contemporary art struggles with this distinction. It tries to pass off authenticity as creativity, or the reverse. A self-portrait is not interesting because it is true. A self-portrait is interesting because the artist has chosen what you see. That is choice, not truth.

What Bowie grasped was that creativity does not mean freedom. It means constraint given by narrative. You choose a story, and then the rest of your choices follow from it. That is precisely where craft and art meet. You are not free. You are subject to the logic of what you tell.

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Sources: David Bowie, BBC interview (2003); biography by Peter Gillam