The rise of digital media and networked communications is bashing apart the traditional boundary between amateur and professional, particularly in the creative fields. As Clay Shirky defines the ‘professional’ in his fabulous book Here Comes Everybody:
A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialization…. Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management: librarians are responsible for organizing books on the shelves, newspaper executives are responsible for deciding what goes on the front page. In these cases, the scarcity of the resource itself creates the need for a professional class — there are few libraries but many patrons, there are few channels but many viewers.
The problem is that digital media and networked communications eliminate scarcity (although not the need to filter…which just gets shifted downstream). And that elimination or shift directly challenges the role of the professional, leading to significant (and well warranted) wringing of hands among creative professionals.
This blog post on ”The Difference between Amateurs and Professionals” is a perfect case in point, as it hits all the expected points and entirely misses the point at the same time. The post suggests that the professional photographers are defined by:
- Their full-time focus on the craft, rather than part-time avocation;
- their entrepreneurial spirit, and focus on the business elements of advancing their careers;
- their continuing quest for improvement and excellence;
- their study of other photographers toward the goal above;
- their individual and unique aesthetic style;
- their technical capacity to achieve excellence with fluidity and speed;
- their passion for the art form — shown in both a compulsion to create without being paid, and the ability to extract a significant fee for their work.
Yet almost every specific differentiation above can equally apply to credentialed ”professionals” and committed ”amateurs.” The common conflation of ”professional” with ”excellent” is subject to significant questioning now that the tools of the craft are so widely available.
Says Shirky again:
Sometimes, though, the professional outlook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have the most at stake — the professionals themselves — from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession.
To my mind, this is one of the core and vexing questions of the on-line world for the arts (and for other industries…but that’s not my table): what is the role of the expert and the excellent in a distributed world? How do we preserve space and return value to those who are extraordinary (by whatever measure you pick)?
I don’t think that’s a professional/amateur question — although that’s the frame we tend to use. In fact, I think the professional/amateur debate in the arts is clouding the deeper conversation.
The root of the word “amateur” is the Latin “amare” – to love.
Very very interesting. I agree wholeheartedly. But what is the deeper conversation being masked or obscured?
I run a performing arts center in a college in a state university system. The college also hosts 4 respected conservatories: music, dance, theater, visual art & design. Conservatory training seeks to preserve the distinction between amateurs and professionals, between the talented, excellent practitioners, and everybody else.
Hope you will continue to advance this line of thinking. Thanks very much!
I suppose one indicator of whether or not you’re a professional is whether or not someone is willing to pay you for doing your art.
Andrew, thanks for posting on one of my favorite topics. I would add the following insights on how novices differ from experts from the National Research Council’s ”How People Learn” (2000; p. 31). There are commonalities in the list to some of your points, but there is also a subtext around how the permeable boundary between an expert and a novice is merely a matter of context.
1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or proposals, but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is ”conditioned” on a set of circumstances.
4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attention to effort.
5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.
Thanks Rebecca,
Great grist for the mill! I’m curious about how you perceive the correlation between the expert/novice distinction and the professional/amateur distinction. I’m sure many would say they were directly aligned, but I can think of many amateurs who fit the ‘expert’ category just as well as their professional counterparts. Thoughts?
Good volley, Andrew! I think the idea of professional/expert has something more to do with being seen as being in that elusive, elite ”inner circle.” In part, it is about the professionalization of a field or art form, where peers, consumers, or gatekeepers set the standards for (or reward) what high achievement looks like — they anoint whether you are ”in the club.” Most of us live in amateur-novice-land and I confess to being an expert at being an amateur — it’s a great way to stay fresh.
I am reminded that this question revolves not just around artists and artistic output, but around arts managers & their work, too.
When make the equation professional artist = expert = high quality artistry = artist makes money, we often forget the role that expert (professional?) arts management plays in that equation. Making money is a business skill; making art is an artistic skill. As a professional arts manager (and a proud amateur artist) I have made it my life’s work to bring those skills together in the appropriate way to encourage and nurture expert, excellent artistic endeavor.
The amateur/professional debate tends to hold a hidden assumption that an artist’s talent and expertise will automatically & magically lead to paying work in the arts (which is also regarded as professional status). That assumption ignores the fact that artists rely on expert arts management skills, either by cultivating those skills themselves, or by aligning themselves with people and organizations who can fill in the gaps. In fact, most artists need the support of strong institutions and organizations in order to fulfill their artistic potential. Those we think of as “professionals” in the arts may simply be those who have better access to the resources that allow them to create their work and bring it to an audience. And every “amateur” may be just one good arts manager away from “going professional.”
“A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialization…. Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management”.
That definition could define any labouring where there is the need for someone who is an expert at anything, from plumbing to business management to the best way to clean a house. That’s a pretty utilitarian definition of the professions. What is the hard problem posed in biology, art, or organized sound? What is the scarce resource behind a concert (apart from audience experience of the artform)? Do we all assume in this arts blog that there is no difference between a profession, a trade, or a job? Before defining the adjectives ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ I think it would be good to get a better definition, one that applies to all the professions.
Every profession is a subject area, not a labour, a job or a skills set, which has at its core the intersection of human experience and some aspect of the external world: visual perception, sound, other living creatures, justice, numbers, thought, divinty, human aggression etc, and which, as a subject, continuously grows its body of knowledge every generation as individuals work in it. Its students absorb, study, and then as professionals themselves, try to add to it and push the subject ‘into the future’. The profession as a subject never goes away no matter what the professional does, no matter how technologies change, but tragically, sometimes its body of knowledge can disappear over time if it’s devalued by a society.
And as far as the idea that a profession is a scarce resource, it is the exact opposite. Its subject area is and always will be available to everyone on the planet as long as human beings survive. Who can tell now how the organization and storage of physical books (which is a subset of a subject area: knowledge in relation to human access) will change in the future? When TV technology arrived everyone said that radio would disappear. It’s an old argument.
A profession is not a set of problems or a set of skills designed to solve them, nor is teh profession defined by those problems. Of course there are quesstions needing to be solved inside the profession, but usually these are created and posed on purpose to push knowledge forward, to bring the body of knowledge closer to new information -no matter how its delivered. Sometimes this new data is mediated by digital tools. But those of us who are perilously close to the market need to be careful that we aren’t so carried away by the new tools that we forget our subject and our humanity.
The adjective ‘professional’ is actually the opposite of “student”, not ‘amateur’. A professional cannot be a student who is still studying the profession. When the adjective is not used to describe someone who’s chosen to spend their working hours within a profession, today it gets used to mean a person who is paid for their daytime work, and in this meaning it becomes the opposite of the adjective ‘amateur’. It can also mean a certain high standard of work set by fellow professionals who work daily in the profession. The first meaning is a joke, because it suggests a one-to-one correspondence between a profession and a fee. There is no such link, which is why professionals are supported in societies that value their subjects -by universities, government bodies, organizations and their managers, private grants, personal family gifts, spouses, sometimes the occasional part-time job, and private teaching (hopefully not too much or teaching the subject as it was yesterday becomes the profession rather than working in it now). Why is there no relationship of fee to profession? Because it is most importantly a subject, and as such it has no value in the market. Aye, there’s the modern rub. A professional does not aim to make a product or a service for utility or for entertainment, although sometimes the results of their work can do either or both. And since an amateur works at the subject part-time and has other work or possibly another profession, they have no need for rent or food money given as a consequence of what they do, and so they pose no problems for society. According to our market-based society therefore, since there is logical connection linking effort to its reward, there can be no professionals, only students and amateurs. Soon there will be no “professions”, only jobs that create objects which are products or services which obtain their values in the marketplace. A concert, a season, a choreography and a mathematical theory, they will all relate to the market and not to a body of knowledge which grew around the intersection of human experience and the nature of the world. Pass the cd…..
I think the only distinction between “amateur” and “professional” artists is that amateurs don’t expect to be able to make a living from what they do, and furthermore do not try. And that’s it.
Very interesting discussion. This has been one that has been going on long before the digital age has made it easy for ‘amateurs’ to get in on our action. I am a photographer, fulltime for 35 years. One of the distinctions is that I make all my income from it…thus am professional. Yes people pay me for my work…so it msut have some appeal. (there are times that are very lean and others that are fat so I guess a professional is one who can deal with the feast and famine existence?) I use Pentax equipment and have for ever. Over the years this has been at times a hinderance to being accepted as a professional. Here’s a typical question stream from ordinary people ” so what kind of camera do you use ? …Nikon?” “No I use Pentax” OH ……” They walk off because clearly I am not a pro since I don’t use the right equipment. The other thing that I noticed was that as people switched from P/S film cameras to digital my sales went up because the quality was not that great. Also when some one would say I could take that picture I often would try to engage them in the ‘teaching’ moment of no you could not because you were not there and the light is gone etc etc. Those who listen would learn something from me.
My listing the above is to say that being a professional in any field is not about the money. ( I am not rich) When I focus on the money I loose the creativity. Art in any of its varied forms is for me an expression that moves society and culture forward . It is a means of giving a positive forward looking direction to the lives of societies. One of the great challenges we have as artists is to deal with a culture that is not appreciative of the deeper expression art can give. It is our ‘job’ to encourage and enhance this appreciation. The digital era has made it possible for millions to give expression to various 2d art forms. But I always know that equipment can and does take good images 95% of the time…it is the 5% that makes an image great and compelling. Because I and other ‘professionals’ take the time and put out effort to dig deeper into the image we will continue to be able to produce images that drive our art starved society forward. We were given talent potentials that we have choosen to develop. We recognize great effort in others. Encourage that in all. Encourage especially those 12-15 year olds.
This is a very interesting post. That definition of professional fits very well. Photography is definitely what I want my profession to be. I just need some help learning how to start a photography business . This is definitely what I want to spend my life doing, I just need a way to turn a profit so I can afford to continue to take photos.