wrote a story about an interesting painter I know and submitted it to an editor of a magazine read by intelligent people who are not artists. "Nice piece," said the editor, "but tell me, is this guy a genius?" I hadn't thought about that. "I don't know," I said. "I guess not." "Our readers would want to read about an eccentric artist if he turns out to be a genius," said the editor, "but if he's not, why bother? Turn it into fiction, make him a genius, and submit it to The New Yorker."

It's no surprise that people outside of the art world can't be bothered with worrying about artists who aren't geniuses. Why bother indeed? In the movie clips that loop continually though our collective brain, an artist must be a genius of some sort in order to be significant. An inspired charlatan at least, if not an authentic visionary.

But most artists are not geniuses, of course. In fact, by definition, most are just about average. This represents something of a demographic disaster, since there are so many artists now. Blame it on the roaring economy, or graduate schools with virtually open admissions policies, or Daryl Hannah's scintillating performance as a performance artist in Legal Eagles, but suddenly the country is lousy with artists. It has become an ordinary thing to be an artist, which has created a vicious cycle of sorts. More ordinary people desire to be artists. More ordinary art is made.

However, while there may be more artists then ever, and there are more places to show and more people willing to buy as well, there are still only a few really good artists around, the people who will count later on, when we're all dead. Say ten. Say a hundred. Say a thousand. You pick the number. Everybody else is in it for the short term benefits. This has always been true, even when there were only eleven - or one hundred and one, or a thousand and one - artists in the world. Once upon a time being the eleventh best artist in an eleven artist world no doubt made you feel pretty special, since you had a virtual headlock on the outsider art market. Nowadays there are literally tens of thousands of artists with run of the mill careers milling about, waiting for a chance to feed, like sharks circling a tuna boat. Being an artist these days won't even get you a seat at the Bedford L stop in Williamsburg.

Back in the fifties, at the dawn of the social upheavals that have led to the present state of affairs, there were far fewer artists then there are now and there was perhaps a tighter consensus about what was going on. The artists themselves, though, showed a wider range of diversity, as is characteristic of any nascent biological or cultural system. As time passes and poorly designed species (and artists) drop out, what is left is a larger and larger population of highly adaptable, largely undifferentiated similar types. Saber-toothed Tigers (and madmen) are gone, for better or worse. What you have eventually is a broader, more stable system with less variation and less interesting things going on.

An important, albeit strange, distinction must be made here between mediocre and average. Average is a social disease; mediocrity is personal, a biological, perhaps religious issue. Since circumstances determine averageness, one probably can't help being average, and so it is easier to defend oneself emotionally against it. It is an artificial arithmetic construct after all, and artists have a built in mechanism for avoiding getting lost in sheer numbers: Artmaking is an elitist profession. Artists have argued for much of this century - but not in all probability before this century - that they wish only to be known to those who possess the intellectual, moral and/or cultural wherewithal to understand them. This position has been argued so fiercely and so successfully that now an artist with too wide an audience becomes suspect; their work must be too easy, too accommodating, too superficial.

This ambivalent Goldilocks relationship with audience - not too big, not too small, just right - provides the sharpest reflected evidence of the increasing insularity of the art world. Artists must reconcile themselves to the reality of small audiences right from the beginning of their careers now. Circumspect art students are already extolling the virtues of a trickle down art culture by the time they learn to mix plaster.

But this is all besides the point. After all, who cares about all these careerist issues? Plenty of people profess not to care. (None of them, I will venture, bother to read this periodical.) The real point is that it is not nearly as interesting to speculate about the general case - Why do so many people turn out to be mediocre artists? - as it is to think about the particular case: You. How will you feel when you wake up one morning and realize you are a mediocre artist?

Unlike averageness, there is no defense against mediocrity. Mediocrity is a matter of the soul. Mediocrity you feel in your bones when you look at your body of work at midnight and you conclude that what is there is simply not that good. That it is never going to make people stop and stare. Never going to move a stranger. It dawns on you with time, and paradoxically, attention. Others look and look and look and cannot fathom its significance. When this happens for decades, you begin to suspect it will always happen.

This is why mediocrity is an issue of middle age. Artists early in their careers can't possibly grasp the concept. You have to live through the disappointment, have to begin to glimpse your mortality and the diminishment of opportunity. Of a limited future. For mediocrity cannot be understood in the now, but only in the flux of time. It is one thing to be dissatisfied with what you have made. It is entirely another thing to start to accept the fact that this is a permanent situation: that you will never be satisfied.

The cruel but redemptive joke is that art can continue to move its creator long after it has ceased to interest anyone else. All art has a power over its creators. This is its great seductive quality. There is no artist who has not said to themselves "this is great!" when wrapped up in the convulsive joy of creation. (Or even, and probably more often: "this is the greatest!") It is only later in the creative struggle, after the orgasmic joy of initial production is fading, when, as Martin Amis puts it, one begins inevitably to wish that the powers that be, the powers that dispense talent, had thrown one higher and further than they have.

It is possible to spend a lifetime transported to ecstasy by one's own work, indifferent to the indifference of the world. This is possible, and even admirable in a way, but wrong headed. Art is about social relationships, about communication. The artists who turn their backs on the world are not artists at all, no matter how interesting the detritus of their self-absorbed tinkering turns out to be.

All art is ultimately mediocre if its goal is to echo "real" experience, and all artists are doomed to fail if they are so naive as to believe that their work can ever mean to another human being what it means to them. But the fantasies we build in the air out of ambition and idealism are not concerned with such details. Artists want it all; they want the art thing to be a real thing, and they want their transcendence to be shared universally. They want all this, and, in addition, they want to believe that they, alone among their peers, deserve it. It's quite a lot to ask certainly, but nevertheless, accepting that one will get to the promised land is still poisonous, torturous.

This is really why, I suppose, we tend to resent and deride those who are represented to have achieved an infantile fantasy of omnipotence; complete professional success and total acceptance, and little wonder. The manner in which the media represents potent, "superior" art to the world continually plays up the same myths of genius which most artists have spent their lifetimes trying to overcome. Katy Siegel in her Artforum sneak preview of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, puts the matter squarely and rudely in laps of her readers, who she seems to assume (quite rightly, probably) are composed of almost no one but jealous artists. "Matthew Barney is better than you . . . he is much better looking than you, much more successful, a much better artist with a much more interesting life (inner as well as outer, apparently)." There isn't much breathing room left, is there?

Barney, like the President or Mark McGwire or Mother Teresa, doesn't really exist as far as you are concerned. These people are aberrations. They are lottery winners, and you know you are not supposed to enter the lottery, for the odds are hopelessly stacked against you. You are better off not thinking about them, but optimism is one of the greatest of human adaptive responses. So you do keep thinking about them, about one day keeping them company. Artists posses an unlimited belief in our own good fortune. We identify ourselves with the winners, whether we have any good reason to do so or not. It keeps us going, thinking we are the next big thing.

Normalcy and averageness may be qualitative notions imposed upon us by the world, but mediocrity is an imposition upon us as well, only we are the imposers. Only in our minds can we objectively rank the worth of things; things which themselves have no inherent ranking. We must make art for the joy of the experience, knowing full well it can never again deliver to us any way near the amount of pleasure that drove us to construct it in the first place. No art can fail if we refuse to accept the myth of the objective object; the art thing that has an inherent, knowable, ratable worth. And no artist is a failure if they refuse to rely on the intellectual and social judgments around them to satisfy their expectations.

Art succeeds in the two interstitial gaps which open up around it, separating it first from its creator, and secondly from its beholders. Both maker and viewer project their fantasies and expectations upon the art object, and both derive satisfaction and information from that object based on an immeasurably complex mixture of what is there and what they wish to be there. Quality is located somewhere outside of the object. Mediocrity is ultimately not the point at all.

There is an old joke about two brothers. One was a terrible artist and an awful egomaniac. The other was a kindly doctor. For years the doctor kept his brother afloat by secretly buying his canvases, and suffered in silence the poor fool's tiresome boasting.

Finally the doctor died and his brother, in the process of settling the estate, discovered every painting he had ever sold in his lifetime neatly stacked in the back of the doctor's garage. He stared at the pile for a long time, then he let out his breath.

"Ah," he thought to himself, "the cunning old bastard was just waiting to cash in on me!" question. Then ask what art is.

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