Waiting to be discovered is a terrible career plan

ART FRIED® Contemporary culture, served hot. Read in one shot. Digest later. One of the art world’s most persistent fantasies is the discovery story. The artist works quietly, develops an extraordinary practice, bothers nobody, and eventually the right person walks into the studio and simply gets it. It is a beautiful narrative because it conveniently removes the awkward machinery of an actual career: applying, sending portfolios, meeting curators, entering selections, shipping work, showing up, returning, building relationships and slowly becoming present. Unfortunately, that machinery is increasingly normal. Open calls are hardly some fringe invention of the art world; museums, foundations, festivals and international programmes use them to find artists and projects beyond the networks they already know. Applying does not make an artist less serious, less pure or less desirable. It means doing something almost offensively professional: making the work available to the possibility of being selected. Of course, not every opportunity deserves an application, and collecting open calls like passport stamps is not a career strategy. The more interesting shift is that access no longer has to begin with somebody important granting you permission to exist. An artist can decide where the work should travel, assess a project, invest when the structure makes sense, and gradually build a personal geography of exhibitions, cities, encounters and returns. There are already programmes explicitly using open calls to create routes for independent artists beyond the traditional gallery system, with curatorial selection and concrete exhibition outcomes. Maybe it is time to retire some of the romance around waiting. Being discovered is wonderful. Knowing how to move is considerably more useful. Art. Culture. No cold takes.