I've thought a bit about why low self-esteem is so common in visual arts, and here are the main reasons why I think it happens. The two main aspects I've identified, and which also don't often come together, are:
§1. The distribution of skill is one with a very long tail, i.e. the difference between good and great is huge. To some extent, every field has a gap between merely good and truly great, but it doesn't always manifest in the same way, leading me to point 2.
§2. You can immediately spot that difference between good and great, you don't really need to train your discernment as much, and there aren't many obstacles in the way. Of course, appreciating all the little details of great visual art takes time and discernment to perceive, but the difference between an amateur and a professional is night and day, and there isn't anything that the former can do to hide their lack of skills
Most disciplines also have a long tail distribution, but it's much harder to evaluate who is good versus who isn't so good, versus who is great, just at a glance. With visual arts however it's instant, you see mistakes immediately, you see imprecisions in anatomy and perspective clearly, you see the stiffness of the pose clearly, you see a badly drawn hand immediately, you see the boring composition immediately, etc.
On the other hand, your friend who plays football (soccer) from time to time with his friends might feel good about his abilities because he never played against a real football player, but every artist has (at least unconsciously) compared their work against the best. It's very brutal.
We can say that activities that directly revolve around competition, such as sports, shield people from seeing just how bad they are, because they tend to play against others who are just as bad as they are, and because professionals play against other professionals, who are good at invalidating their play. We don't often see how good professionals are because their play is constrained by the opposite side, until they play against amateurs, and the difference is clear as day.
Another factor that makes the assessment difficult is when people do not readily have access to experiences that can confirm whether their ideas are good or not. Every field which is related to complex sense-making for instance, such as history, politics, economics, psychology and sociology, 1 does not have a clear feedback loop to assess how good someone is. You can verify whether they can reliably retrace the information you've given to them, but whether that knowledge is actually used well in practice is a whole another issue.
In contrast, your output as an artist is the proof, and it sits right in front of you, which is probably why a lot of artists hate their work, because it's the living proof of what they haven't mastered yet—though I don't think that fusing your sense of worth with how good you are at a particular good is necessarily healthy.
Another factor that makes discernment difficult is when an activity is inherently temporal, as opposed to spatial like with visual arts. Music, movie and literature are temporal forms of art, because you experience them in time, which is why you can only experience the symphony or the novel one moment at a time, never everything at once.
As a result, it is much more difficult to build out the unity of the underlying piece, and thus appreciate the whole of the work, whereas that same unity is essentially presented to us directly in visual arts. This is why shallow critiques of stories always focus on the narrow things that they understand, because they are unable to step beyond their prejudices and limited horizons to appreciate the whole of the work, the same way that the chronic porn watcher is unable to feel out the entire beauty of a woman, and instead stares out at her breasts.
This difference between space and time is why diagrams are laid out in space, because visuals allow us to present a bunch of information all at once, whereas the depth of a story can only come through us in time, because there is an implicit, more nuanced and profound communication that arises from the entirety of a story, which cannot be communicated through a short aphorism or quote.
A third aspect that makes low self-esteem common in visual arts is that the curve to become good (not great) is convex as opposed to concave. You need to be good at several things at once for the result to be good, because any notable mistake in any aspect of a drawing or painting makes the result look bad, which means that the beginning is a slow, painful build-up of the fundamentals, until something coherent and harmonious can emerge.
In contrast, I would say that cooking for yourself is easy to do good enough, but very hard to be great at. You don't need to be amazing at anything to make a meal that tastes good. Even if your cutting is imprecise and slow, even if you can't pan toss, you can still make something decent for yourself by picking easy recipes, and following them to the letter. Of course cooking for others is another thing, the skill required to make food in a restaurant is way higher, but you get my point.
In general, anything is difficult to be great at, because every learning curve runs into a plateau of diminishing returns, (mastery is about details and very subtle nuances) but some things are easy to reach a satisfying level.
Perphaps more controversially, photography is significantly easier than drawing or painting. That doesn't mean that it is easy to be great at, though it is certainly easier than the latter, but it is especially noticeable with the early phases of learning. An amateur photograph can still make things look good, but an amateur painter's work looks incredibly crude.
This is why modern people so often turn to photography as opposed to much more demanding crafts, because the comforts of modern life, and the ubiquity of social media that erodes people's attention span and work ethic, drive people away from things that require real mastery, preferring things with a much quicker 'return on investment'.
To me it's not even debatable that photography is easier than drawing or painting. The latter require thousands of hours to be good at, let alone be great at, which requires decades of commitment, whereas my estimate is that you can be good at photography within hundreds of hours.
A fourth aspect that makes low self-esteem common in arts is the psychology of the people that field attracts. Some fields attract arrogant people, or even grifters, whereas others don't. Marketing, business, and anything adjacent to those, attracts people who think that their ideas are so great that wealth is just around the corner, even though they might have a very poor track record, and keep chasing trends and gimmicks, as opposed to develop solid foundations for their career and their business.
Artists on the other hand are not really the type of people to sell themselves and work hard on building a good image (the dreaded 'brand building' of modern times) of themselves, they would rather focus on good work, which is both a virtue but also a problem in this society where branding and marketing are essentially necessities in order to stand out from all the noise.
Anything in the realm of ideas has a push towards arrogance, as I explained in my piece about the origin of arrogance, because the consequences of ideas come about much later than their approval and execution, meaning that people who work with ideas, such as in sciences, or in socio-political domains, often develop the capacity for arguing for their ideas, which comes with a certain form of arrogance (or at least appears as such).
Visual arts however, while they are of course grounded in ideas and principles, are ultimately the result of practice, commitment, patience, discernment and sensitivity. In terms of the 4 elements, visual arts stand closer to water (sensitivity) and earth (diligence), with some form of air (ideas, vision) to give it a direction. But artists tend to be really bad with fire on the other hand, thinking of their work as valuable, setting boundaries against things that prevent them for working on their art, that type of thing.
Incidentally, this is why art tends to attract left-wing people nowadays, though it wasn't always the case, because 'left' and 'right' are notions which have continually shifted over time (many of the great artists of the past would probably be seen as deeply conservative in our times). The left-wing tends to lean more towards sensitivity and compassion, as opposed to confidence and self-assertiveness, and this bias manifests in individual, but especially group psychology, where no one in left-wing spaces is allowed to say that they are good at something, or that they're confident in themselves, everyone has to play a game of minimizing themselves and putting others on a pedestal, that type of stuff, which is why low self-esteem is very prevalent in the left-wing, and thus in art spaces.
1 And sciences too to some degree. The natural sciences are 'harder' fields than let's say psychology, in the sense that they have models which are significantly more reliable than in the 'soft sciences' (because there are way less variables at play, and causality determines physics in a way that it doesn't when it comes to human beings), but it's still very easy to deceive yourself with regards to how much you know about sciences, because there isn't a clear feedback loop that involves your knowledge and your own life. If the test for being good at physics was more about engineering than theoretical knowledge, I think that a lot of physicists would be greatly humbled at how difficult it is to actually apply their knowledge in the real world.
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2026-06-30