Who Gets to Decide - Artist Professional Support

Who Gets to Decide You're an Artist?

As both an artist and a mentor, I’ve realised many of us aren’t struggling with impostor syndrome. We’re waiting for permission.

By Sarah Francis @sarahfrancis.art

Over the years, one conversation has stayed with me more than almost any other.

An artist will quietly admit, “I don’t really feel like a proper artist.”

Sometimes they’re just beginning their practice. Sometimes they’ve been making work for twenty years. Some have recently graduated, while others have exhibited nationally, received funding or have work in museum collections. The remarkable thing is that the feeling sounds almost identical regardless of where they are in their career.

As an artist, I recognise it immediately because I’ve felt it too. I’ve questioned whether I deserved opportunities, whether my work was good enough and whether someone would eventually realise I didn’t belong. Those thoughts didn’t disappear after my first exhibition, or my first funding application, or the first time my work entered a public collection. If anything, they simply found new reasons to exist.

Listening to artists speak so openly over the years has made me question whether we’ve given this feeling the right name. We often call it impostor syndrome, but I’m not convinced that’s always what it is. I think many artists are simply waiting for somebody else to tell them they’ve finally earned the right to call themselves an artist.

The problem is that moment rarely comes.

We’re collecting proof

The more I thought about these conversations, the more I realised artists spend an extraordinary amount of time collecting evidence that they’re legitimate.

An exhibition.
An Arts Council grant.
A residency.
Gallery representation.
A museum acquisition.
A degree.
A publication.
A sale.
An award.

Each one quietly promises the same thing. “When I get this, I’ll finally feel like a real artist.”

Sometimes it works. Usually it lasts a few weeks. Then another milestone appears on the horizon, and we begin believing that one will finally be enough.

The finish line isn’t moving because we’re ambitious.

It’s moving because external achievements can never permanently answer an internal question.

But who actually decides?

At some point I started asking myself something different.

Who exactly are we waiting for?

Is it a curator?
A gallery?
Arts Council England?
Our tutors?
Collectors?
Instagram?
Family?
Other artists?

If all of those people told you tomorrow that you were a brilliant artist, would the doubts disappear forever? I don’t think they would. Because the question isn’t really about recognition.

It’s about legitimacy.

We’re hoping someone else will tell us we belong, when belonging has never been something another person could permanently give us.

Art has no finish line

Part of the problem is that being an artist doesn’t follow a clear path.

Most professions have obvious markers of progress. You qualify. You become more experienced. You earn promotions. Other people recognise your expertise because there are shared definitions of success.

Art doesn’t work like that.

One artist might spend thirty years making quietly in a shed behind their house.
Another might exhibit internationally before they’re thirty.
One artist measures success through public engagement.
Another through teaching.
Another through making one honest piece of work every month.

There isn’t one correct career.

That freedom is beautiful.

It’s also unsettling.

Without a shared finish line, it’s easy to assume everyone else has reached a destination that somehow remains out of your reach.

We only compare ourselves upwards

I’ve noticed something else. Artists almost never compare themselves with where they used to be. Instead, we compare ourselves with someone slightly further ahead.

If you’ve just graduated, you compare yourself with artists who’ve been exhibiting for ten years.
If you’ve secured your first funding, you compare yourself with someone who’s received ten.
If you’re represented by a gallery, you compare yourself with someone represented by a bigger one.
Eventually you compare yourself with artists showing internationally.

The comparison never ends because there will always be another artist whose career appears more successful than your own.

We’re measuring ourselves against a moving target. No wonder so many of us feel like we’re falling behind.

Then we finally talk honestly

One of the things I love most about mentoring and peer groups is what happens when somebody admits they’re struggling.

There’s usually a pause.

Then another artist says, “I thought I was the only one.”

Suddenly the room changes.

Artists begin talking honestly about rejected applications, abandoned ideas, difficult exhibitions and moments when they almost gave up altogether.

The strange thing is that these conversations often happen between people who assumed everyone else had it figured out.

They hadn’t.

They’d simply become very good at hiding uncertainty.

I don’t think confidence is as common as we imagine.

I think silence is.

Social media has made certainty look normal

That silence becomes even louder online.

We scroll through funding announcements, exhibition photographs, residency opportunities and press coverage. We see careers presented as a neat sequence of successes, but almost never the uncertainty that sits underneath them.

We don’t see the seven unsuccessful applications before the funding announcement.
We don’t see the studio days where nothing worked.
We don’t see the projects abandoned halfway through, or the conversations where artists quietly admit they’re completely stuck.

When all we see are outcomes, certainty begins to look normal.

It isn’t.

It’s just more photogenic than doubt.

The cost of waiting

The hardest part isn’t feeling like an impostor. It’s what those feelings persuade us not to do. I’ve watched artists delay applying because they don’t think they’re ready. Price work lower than they intended because they assume nobody will pay more. Turn down opportunities because they believe someone else deserves them.

Stay silent in conversations where their opinion matters.

Keep work hidden in studios for years because they think one more course, one more exhibition or one more achievement will finally make them worthy of sharing it.

Sometimes the biggest barrier isn’t a lack of talent. It’s the belief that permission is still waiting somewhere in the future.

So what makes someone an artist?

I’ve come to think we’re asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “When will I finally become a real artist?”

Perhaps we should ask, “What do I think will finally prove it?”

Because every answer I’ve ever heard points towards something external.

Yet the artists I admire most don’t seem to have reached a magical point where all uncertainty disappears. They’ve simply accepted that uncertainty travels with the work. They continue making anyway.

Perhaps that’s what being an artist really is. Not never doubting yourself.
Not collecting enough achievements to silence your inner critic.
But returning to the studio.
Making the next piece.
Remaining curious.
Continuing the conversation with your work, even when certainty never arrives.
Maybe nobody else gets to decide you’re an artist.

Maybe that decision has always been yours.

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