Against Default Settings

Artists spend an extraordinary amount of time developing a studio practice. We learn how to work. We experiment with materials, refine techniques, develop research methodologies, and slowly begin to understand the conditions under which our best work emerges. Over time, most artists develop a fairly sophisticated understanding of how they make art.

Far fewer spend that same amount of time developing a decision-making practice.

I'm not talking about the decisions that happen inside the studio. I'm talking about everything that surrounds it. Whether to accept an exhibition. Whether to pursue representation. Whether to teach. Whether to apply for a residency. Whether to collaborate. Whether to relocate. Whether to raise prices. Whether to remain patient. Whether to say yes. Whether to say no.

These decisions shape careers just as profoundly as the work itself, yet they're often treated as though they should come naturally. We tend to assume that if our artistic practice becomes more intentional over time, our career decisions will as well. I'm no longer convinced that's true.

Part of the problem is that the contemporary art world offers very little guidance for making these kinds of decisions. Unlike many professions, there are few transparent career paths. Information is unevenly distributed. Professional norms are largely unwritten. Advice is contradictory. Gatekeeping, reputation, access to privilege, and proximity to power all influence outcomes in ways that are difficult to see while you're living through them. Many artists spend years trying to understand a system that often appears intentionally opaque.

In environments like that, people adapt.

We develop instincts. We learn what feels dangerous and what feels safe. We begin to recognize patterns, draw conclusions, and create internal rules that help us navigate uncertainty. Those rules rarely appear all at once. They're assembled gradually from lived experience. Some emerge from scarcity. Others from opportunity. Some are inherited from mentors, graduate programs, or communities. Others come from painful experiences we'd rather not repeat. Whatever their origin, they become part of the way we move through the world.

Eventually, those adaptations stop feeling like adaptations.

They become common sense.

That phrase has become increasingly interesting to me because common sense is rarely as universal as we pretend it is. Ask two artists whether they should accept the same opportunity and you'll often hear entirely different answers, each presented with complete confidence. One artist sees financial security as the responsible choice. Another believes preserving autonomy is the responsible choice. Someone else is thinking about long-term visibility. Someone else is asking whether the opportunity aligns with the life they're trying to build. They're responding to the same situation, but they're making sense of it through entirely different internal logics.

What fascinates me isn't that they disagree.

It's that each person experiences their reasoning as obvious.

I think that's because we rarely experience our decision-making frameworks as frameworks. We experience them as reality. The assumptions that have helped us navigate the world become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as assumptions at all. They simply become "the way things work."

I've spent much of my writing life examining this phenomenon at the institutional level. The art world is filled with narratives that become more powerful through repetition. We begin treating visibility as though it's synonymous with success, exhaustion as evidence of commitment, scarcity as a marker of authenticity, or constant availability as professionalism. Eventually those narratives stop sounding like stories and begin sounding like facts.

What I've become increasingly interested in is how those larger narratives become personal.

How they become the quiet logic behind our own decisions.

Over the last six months, I've been developing a workshop called Against Default Settings as a way of exploring that question. Participants work through a series of hypothetical career scenarios before discussing not only what decision they made, but why they made it. There are no correct answers because the workshop isn't designed to identify the best decision. It's designed to make visible the reasoning that made one particular decision feel inevitable.

That's what I've come to think of as our default settings.

Not personality.

Not identity.

Not destiny.

Default settings are the adaptive ways we've learned to interpret uncertainty. They help explain why two artists can encounter the same situation and instinctively move in opposite directions while each believing they're simply exercising good judgment.

The goal isn't to replace those instincts. In many cases they've served us remarkably well. They've helped us survive difficult systems, avoid repeating painful experiences, and build meaningful careers. But the strategies that help us reach one stage of our lives aren't always the strategies that help us reach the next.

Against Default Settings isn't about teaching artists how to make the right decision. I don't believe such a thing exists independent of context. Every artist deserves the freedom to define success on their own terms.

What it offers instead is something much smaller, but potentially more powerful: the opportunity to pause before treating our first instinct as our only option. To recognize that what feels like common sense may simply be one way of understanding the situation in front of us. To ask whether the decision we've always made is still serving the career we're actually trying to build.

Every computer comes with default settings. Most of us eventually change them. Not because the defaults were wrong, but because we realize there's a better configuration for the way we actually work.

I suspect our careers deserve the same level of attention.

That realization has left me with a different question.

If our careers are shaped as much by the decisions we make as the work we produce, then perhaps the most important thing isn't simply understanding the opportunities in front of us. It's understanding the logic we consistently bring to those opportunities.

Over the last several months, one thing has become increasingly clear to me.

Those logics aren't random.

Certain patterns appear again and again.

Not because artists fit neatly into categories, but because human beings develop remarkably consistent ways of navigating uncertainty.

Against Default Settings grew out of trying to understand those patterns.

The essays that follow are an attempt to map them.