What Type of Artist Are You? Non-quiz

Every now and then I come across one of those “Which character from [insert: Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, Star Wars etc.] are you?” quizzes. Buzzfeed seems particularly relentless at producing them, often as many as several per day. As fun as they are, I usually ignore them, however I have taken four or five Myer-Briggs tests, which generally earn more respect than “What Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry house do you belong in?”. Taken by about 2 million people annually, and especially popular in the corporate world and on dating sites, they have actually been proved completely meaningless, as this article explains. According to Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell, the Myer-Briggs test, which was developed in the 1940s, was “based on the totally untested theories of Carl Jung and is now thoroughly disregarded by the psychology community. Even Jung warned that his personality ‘types’ were just rough tendencies he’d observed, rather than strict classifications. Several analyses have shown the test is totally ineffective at predicting people’s success in various jobs, and that about half of the people who take it twice get different results each time”. Which was exactly my experience, although it didn’t stop me from taking the test a few times, just like “getting” a random character from a TV series or film won’t stop people from enthusiastically clicking on yet another link as it pops up in their newsfeed. Why is that? It’s simple: our brains love tribalism. We are wired at birth to pick and favor our own group over others. Henri Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm experiment from 1970s proved just how easy it is for discrimination to occur between groups. He demonstrated that the minimal condition needed for group favoritism is simply categorization, no matter how arbitrary the criteria, which in the case of the experiment was merely flipping a coin.

So what personality quizzes do is really responding to that need. We are attracted to the idea of finding our group based on our personality, rather than geography (like a family), on what we value and cherish. So instead of writing that long overdue email to someone, finishing an article or paying a bill, we will engage in a quiz, no matter how stupid, and then we will share our results, asking “I got so-and-so, and what about you?” to find our tribemates. But there’s a certain value to be found in those quizzes, for we can actually learn about ourselves — and not from the result we get but from our response to it. People who take a test over and over again because they got Charlotte York although they identified themselves with Carrie Bradshaw, have a certain idea of themselves which needs validation. And if they try to investigate why that is, they have a chance of getting a better understanding of their ideals and shortcomings. Perhaps they would like to be free and spontaneous but are in fact rigid and constrained, and instead of either accepting this trait or working on changing it, they want a test to tell them that they’re indeed who they want to be. If they realise that this is the case, then I would say the quiz did its job. Whatever gives us the incentive to be honest with ourselves is good.

What I am proposing below is not exactly a quiz per se, for there are no answers and questions, but you can think of it more like a result sheet. It comes from a lot of observations of artists, as well as numerous conversations, books and articles I’ve read about people’s approach to making art, their goals, routines, and efforts. A lot of people make some form of art, some of them calling themselves artists, others not. And while I’m not saying that categorisation or labelling is important, I believe that knowing what we want to be as artists and where we want to get, is crucial to taking the right steps and shaping our life according to our goals. So the aim of my post is this: get us to look at ourselves and ask some important questions.