Does Your Art Mean Anything If No One Sees It?

What George Miller taught me about the audience's role in your art.

Season 4 of the Artwell podcast is available now! I studied Mad Max director George Miller and to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.

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Your Art Is Not For You

If you’re putting your art into the world, you’re doing so with the expectation that people will consume it. Saying you’re making your art ‘for yourself’, and that you ‘don’t care if people see it’ is just a defense mechanism for when they inevitably don’t. Setting out with the intention of not making something for an audience just means you’re setting out with the intention of making something no one wants to see.

The reason we tell stories is to share our unique perspective of the world with others. The act of telling a story itself requires there to be someone to tell it to. In order for a story to be shared, there must be an audience to receive it.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to share them. Stories don’t exist in a vacuum, or with just one person… we tell stories in order to make a community. And the movies still do that. They still reach a lot of people. They still make meaning.” – George Miller, Director, 2024

To truly know what you’ve made you must share it with the world. You can think you’ve written the funniest joke ever but you won’t know for sure until you’re telling it in front of a group of strangers. Your subjective opinion about your art is not the truth. After editing the first Mad Max, George Miller thought it was terrible, but despite his feelings towards the film, it went on to become one of the most influential movies ever made… not to mention one of the most successful at the box office. You might be able to deceive yourself about what you’ve made, but the audience is incapable of lying to you. You don’t know what you have until they tell you so.

“There’s only one moment of truth in filmmaking – when you sit in the theater with a paying audience for the first time. They’ve paid the baby-sitter, parked the car, bought the tickets and they’re waiting for magic on the screen. That’s the moment. Everything else is secondary to that.” – George Miller, Director, 1996 

Make For An Audience, Not Because of One

Just because you’re making things for an audience does not mean that they should dictate what you create. The moment you start making things solely to get something from others is the moment you stop being an artist and you start being a conman, doing whatever you have to to manipulate people’s emotions to get what you want.

“You don't sit down and put a lot of formulas together, that's cynical filmmaking and it never works.” – George Miller, Director, 1979

If the purpose of art is to share your point of view with the world, the impetus for your art needs to start with you, and not with the world. The audience should never be the reason you make something, you should create things because you want to create them. The driving force should be that you have an idea you feel so strongly about that you have no other option than to make it exist. But if the goal is for other people to consume your work, you need to make sure you’re presenting it in such a way that they actually want to consume it. Your responsibility as an artist is not only what you share but how you share it. 

“Deciding what to leave out and what to insist on is part of your art. One author I know is willing to watch his books sit unsold, because that’s a better outcome to him than changing the essence of what he’s written. He has passion for his craft, but no real passion for spreading his ideas. And if the ideas don’t spread, if no gift is received, then there is no art, only effort.” – Seth Godin, Linchpin, 2010

The audience should not guide your creation, but they should influence your revisions. There are infinite ways to get your point across, and it is arrogant to think that the one way you’ve stumbled upon is the most effective. You want to get feedback from outside perspectives before releasing your art to make sure that it actually has resonance and that you’re not deceiving yourself. You’re not looking to change what you’re saying, but rather how you’re saying it. This does not take away from you as an artist; how you choose to intake feedback and make revisions are artistic decisions that only you can make. The audience might be able to tell you where your art is broken, but they cannot tell you how to fix it. 

"I am not a huge advocate of concept testing, but user testing is brilliant. The idea of, ‘Did you have fun? If you didn't have fun, why didn't you have fun? Why were you confused at this? Did you not know where to go?’ You know, the sort of visceral reaction, versus, ‘Do you like red or blue?’ That's useless in my opinion. It doesn't mean that I don't trust other people's opinion, it's just that when you do that all you do is get that subjective opinion and you're not really following the vision that you want. But the objective of like, ‘Is what we're doing enjoyable?’ I think anybody who forgets that you end up making a game that you're surprised, ‘why doesn't anybody like this?’ Because I don’t think you let anybody in. You didn't let them in to say hmm this wasn't fun and this is why it wasn't fun – even if it's a deeply held belief… there are times when you're just wrong." – Cory Barlog, Game Director, 2018

Make Sure The Audience Sees It

The work is not done when the art is finished. If your responsibility is to present your ideas in such a way that others can receive them, then it is also your responsibility to make sure that people actually receive them. Promoting your work is still a part of the process and needs to be treated with the same level of respect that you give everything else. In today's oversaturated world, the best work does not rise to the top on its own; it needs a push, because if people don’t know your work exists, how do you expect them to consume it?

“A film is a comprehensive process. There are three basic elements to it. The first is the concept of filming, in which I include screenplay. The second is the execution of the film, which includes financing, shooting, and post-production. The third is the sell of the film. All these things are highly integrated. You can't divorce them, and if you are talking about cinema that's related to audiences, then all these things relate back to them… Some people say of this attitude: "That's commercial cynical filmmaking". But it's not. It's making films to function in a society like every other sort of entertainment.” – George Miller, Director, 1979

Promoting your work isn’t something you do once, it is a continuous process. Spending months, if not years, making something and promoting it for a couple of weeks is a disservice not only to the art, but to yourself. Publicist Barbara Cave Henricks urges “authors to consider how long it took them to write their books and see them published, and to devote at least that much time to pushing them.” That may sound like a lot of work, but here’s the thing: you should want to promote your work for the same amount of time it took you to make it. If you’re actually proud of what you’ve made, then you shouldn’t have to be convinced to tell people about it. 

“I know a lot of people who make things, who don't stand proudly by their stuff… you mean to tell me that you're going to be passive with your own shit and just put it on your [Instagram] Story once? I'm still promoting my album that came out in June. It's a year out and I'm still out here. And what I notice is that some of these younger guys and girls, they like ‘Oh yeah, I got a song out’ and they forget about it and I'm like, no, let motherfuckers know, tell people! When I first put the perfume out, dude, I had bags of the samples just walking up to people like, ‘Hi, I'm Tyler I made this.’ Because I put time and too much energy into this finished project just to put it on Instagram and forget about it. Like, no promote your shit. Let people know, be proud of the shit that you made.” – Tyler the Creator, Artist, 2022

Marketing isn’t just about getting people to see your work, but influencing how they see your work. Getting people through the door is one thing, but you want them to go back out the door feeling better than when they walked in. How you market your art impacts how people experience it. The first time someone sees what you’ve made is when you promote it. That impression is carried with them when they finally sit down to consume it. If the trailer for your comedy film has all the best bits in it, people are going to leave the theater dissatisfied. As an artist, you must treat marketing as a part of the craft because you are still curating the experience for your audience. Handing it off to someone else to do is like asking someone else to write the beginning of your story. 

“The story is not finished when you actually get it in the can, as I used to say. The so-called marketing of the film is a continuation of the storytelling and the level of care and skill with which it's done really is important – you can't misdirect the audience that you're inviting into the story.” — George Miller, Director, 2024

Your Art Belongs to the Audience

Once your art is out in the world, it no longer belongs to you; it belongs to the world. You have no control over how people experience and interpret your work. The meaning you have given your story is your subjective opinion and is not the reality for everyone. Your story, if told correctly, should function on multiple levels, allowing people to read it in different ways, even ways you hadn’t foreseen.

George Miller once visited South Africa and people kept coming up to him to discuss the movie he’d made about the apartheid. If you look at his filmography, it doesn’t appear that he’s made anything about racial segregation in South Africa. The movie they were all referring to was Babe, a film Miller wrote and produced about a pig that wants to be a sheepdog. While he tried to explain that it wasn’t the intent no one would listen; to them, Babe was a movie about apartheid.

“You make stories and you really don't know how they're going to be received. You put everything, you know, all your skills and wisdoms and.. you put it there and you really don't know what you have. Often it takes about five or ten years if it does impinge at all to really understand what the story meant. That's the key to this – all narratives have to be in the eye of the beholder.” – George Miller, Director, 2020

A story well told is allegorical; it places universal human experiences in an unfamiliar context allowing the audience to relate it back to their own lived experience. Babe, while not intentionally about the apartheid, was about prejudice in a more general sense. But for people living in South Africa, their experience with prejudice was in the form of apartheid, so when they saw Babe and related it back to their own lives, that is what they saw. When your story is open to interpretation, you leave space for people to add their own meaning. They take what you’ve made, and make it personal to them.

Wanting people to see your story exactly how you see it, and take away exactly what you want them to take away is arrogant and a byproduct of your ego. When you write stories with your message on the surface, when you put the subtext front and center people are unable to find their own meaning. And if they can’t find their own meaning, your work will mean nothing to them. Your job isn't to tell people what to think; it’s to tell them the best story you can, and let the pieces fall where they may. 

“Joseph Campbell had a marvelous quote from the Zanzibar Swahili storytellers who would say this when they finished a story, ‘The story has been told. If it was good it belongs to everybody, if it was bad it was my fault’.” – George Miller, Director, 2020

You Need The Audience, And The Audience Needs You

While you need the audience to tell your story to, the audience also needs you to tell them stories. Stories help us make sense of the world; they present life’s biggest problems in ways we are detached from, allowing us to grapple with them in a way that isn’t directly related to our own lives. It is through this process that we are able to come to conclusions about the world around us and our purpose within it. Without stories, there is only madness.

“Somewhere in our neurophysiology, we've been hardwired for story. There is a kind of narrative imperative - we can't be without stories and we find them where we can. Out there in the calamitous give and take of life, we look for coherence. Patterns, beliefs, signals amongst the noise. It's one of the things humans do. We strive instinctively to instil meaning out of life.” – George Miller, Director, 1996

The stories you tell can change the world by changing the people who change the world. But that cannot happen if the world does not see it. Your art doesn’t make an impact if there’s no one there to make an impression on. Setting out with the expressed purpose of only making something for yourself is counter to why we make things in the first place. Without the audience, your art means nothing. 

If you’re going to tell a story, make it matter. Your duty as an artist is to confront the human condition, to grapple with life’s unknowns and distill them in a way that other people can understand. That is not something that should be taken lightly. A powerful story in the wrong hands can have disastrous consequences. You’re dealing with something that has the ability to alter someone’s life across space and time; act like it. 

“Storytelling is a force of nature. There should be one of those warnings stencilled on the container "Hazardous material" or, at the very least, "Handle with care". – George Miller, Director, 1996

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Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter for more essays that help you become a more thoughtful artist. If you want to learn more about George Miller, you’ll like Season 4 of the Artwell podcast where I studied his career and interviewed his collaborators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.

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