Artists are lazy!?
Photographers often ask me what it takes to “make it” in the art world. While photographing the Casa del Portuale in Naples, I had time to reflect on my own path. Over those few days, as I stood in front of the building, messages from fellow photographers kept coming in with the same question. Here’s a brief summary of my thoughts—shaped only by my own experience and lot of talks with other photographers.
I am not afraid of failing but of stagnation.
The general reputation of artists is often that they’re lazy. I’ve heard it many times. But I believe artists need to be among the hardest working people. If you want to make it as an artist, you have to work relentlessly—failing many times, getting back up, learning, and constantly looking inward to understand what you feel, why you feel it, and how to express it.
Being an artist impacts every level of life. Unlike a “normal” job, you can’t separate your work from who you are. Art eats into your time, your relationships, your sleep, your resources—everything. I often work 12 to 14 hours a day, and still feel it’s never enough. I remember nights standing in the darkroom until three in the morning, exhausted, hungry, but unable to stop because the print wasn’t right yet. Dedication means giving your life over to something most people will never understand. It means sacrificing comfort, stability, and sometimes even people you love. Art demands nothing less.
And that’s why the biggest danger for artists is not failure, but entitlement. The moment you feel entitled, you stop growing. You start believing the problem isn’t you, but the world—that people are blind for not seeing your greatness. But the truth is brutal: the world doesn’t owe you recognition, and it never will.
Entitlement makes you passive. You wait for others to notice you instead of fighting for your vision. You demand everything but end up with nothing. It’s poison to creativity. I never had that illusion. I knew from the start that I didn’t deserve success. That knowledge pushed me to work harder, stay honest, and keep learning. Even now, when my photographs hang in collections around the world, I don’t see it as something I “deserve.” It’s only the consequence of giving everything.
But entitlement has a silent twin, just as destructive: mediocrity.
Mediocrity is not an absolute condition—it’s a choice. It’s not something you’re born into, nor a prison you’re stuck in forever. It’s not even about talent. Mediocrity is what happens when you settle for less than your potential, when you prefer the comfort of being “good enough” over the risk of reaching for something extraordinary.
That’s why mediocrity is everywhere. It hides in the safe decisions, the polished clichés, the endless repetition of what already worked once. I’ve felt it myself—the temptation to stop after a “good” print, even though I knew I could push further. But every time I gave in to that comfort, the work lost something essential. That’s why I’ve learned that sometimes you have to reject the merely good—even to the point of being disgusted by it—in order to carve a path toward the best.
And this is what makes mediocrity so dangerous: it often comes disguised as success. You can get attention for being good. You can even make a living. But I learned, the good is the enemy of the best or great. Good is not getting you seen anymore, there are too many good photographers or artist. In order to be seen and to make it into the Art world you need to create something new, extraordinary, something that is different.
Entitlement and mediocrity are two sides of the same coin: one tells you the world already owes you everything, the other convinces you that what you have is already enough. Both will kill your art.
The only way forward is to refuse both lies, and to give yourself fully to the work—risking everything, demanding everything, sacrificing everything. Because in the end, art only reveals its truth to those who are relentless enough to pursue it without compromise.
