On Good and Bad Art Friends

Sunset over the Bosphorus Strait

I had this in my drafts for well over a month so I’m going to go hit send. We’ve been in Istanbul, doing research and a travel article (to fund personal work). I’ll get round to sharing something about it here but I also feel the need to concentrate that energy into something substantive and tangible, which is in progress. For the moment we’re back in Scotland and we’re at peak leaf fall. The browning leaf litter, red-leaved maples trees and ripe rowan berries are making the world feverishly beautiful and enchanted. We’ve been catching up with friends and family. We’re about to head across the pond to New England and NYC. It’s been a few years since we were stateside. I was nervous I’d be refused entry this time since Cuba was designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 2021 but I went in 2016 which means I’m good… Please send tips for witchy bookshops, vegan food, interesting folklore, people to meet etc.

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A friend recently finished RF Kuang’s brilliant Yellowface and said it reminded her of this New York Times article from three years ago titled ‘Who is the Bad Art Friend? Like Yellowface, it’s painful reading. It centres writers Sonya Larson, Dawn Dorland, a plagiarism accusation, gossip, and a kidney donation.

In short, a writer within a writers’ group used another writer’s experience as the seed to write a very unflattering character – a white saviour – in a short story called “The Kindest”. Allegedly, Larson hadn’t spoken about it with Dorland, whose experiences she used, but when the latter found out, Larson, according to the article, emphasised it was okay to glean inspiration from real life and when pressed acted like they weren’t friends but acquaintances. Dorland believed it was a personal attack after reading the story and seeing the context of messages shared between Larson and other writers in the group who had clearly laid into Dorland in private. Dorland had donated a kidney to a stranger, something she was proud of. She was shocked to discover others saw it as a narcissistic gift, made for self-gain. Perhaps Larson was right, and Dorland’s act of kindness was done with ulterior motives. And Larson is right: writers draw inspiration from real life. But from afar, the story feels mean-spirited. It is okay to harbour these views in private – or steal a seed of it for fiction – but that’s not what was happening here, where parts of Dorland’s life were copied verbatim, and she was ostracised from her writing community for airing her feelings.

Within this story there are certainly reverberations of Yellowface, where June doesn’t actually like her friend Athena, the more successful Chinese American writer, but remains, superficially at least, her friend – and plagiarises her work. They are glorified acquaintances, neither getting deep into the other person’s worlds, both mining each others’ lives. Both are flawed, though Kuang, in interviews, has repeated time and time again that she likes June, and doesn’t see her as the “baddie.” That much is clear in reading the novel. Instead, both authors are trying to survive and do the only thing that renders life meaningful, within a capitalist system – the market – which proclaims to be ethical and like diversity but often just cares about profit.

Both stories expose the exploitative nature of some friendships – where it’s done for social clout, for opportunism, or ‘good material’ – where a professional network is seen as synonymous with friendship and boundaries blur. A bit of this is understandable. In a capitalist world, with fewer natural resources in our hands, people have to be more resourceful. We don’t, after all, benefit from the same nepotism of the very privileged, so aren’t we just creating our own network – engaging in that same opportunism?

But it’s chilling that these extractive relationships can be mistaken for real ones. They render the art world a more hostile place and impair trust. There can be the sense you don’t really know who is a real art friend and who is there to take something from you — who’d be just as ready to piggyback off your success as they’d be to pull you down, turn a blind eye or acquiesce to it. That you don’t know who will mine your private life for their art. Many years back I interviewed a well-known artist and she told me she doesn’t have artist friends from the same discipline. Citing many of the reasons mentioned here, she said it doesn’t work out. This is a sad perspective on art-making but makes sense when our friendships are the shallow things that modern life has enabled them to be — where we can be friends with everyone but no one at all.

The other day I received a care box from an old friend. It was full of kind and thoughtful things – some found, some handmade, incorporating symbols only known by close friends, and a letter. She is not an art friend, but a good friend; this is the most important thing for art and for life, and something I want to drip into all of my friendships – artistic or not.

Artist friendships can and do exist. They can be deeply important. Over the years I’ve cultivated a few close and important writer friendships. We discuss ideas freely and sometimes share work. I have with them, the sense that we value each others’ thoughts and journeys and want to help the other distil these. Maybe part of this hinges on people’s ability to be vulnerable together – be it sharing work and being kindly honest, and/or feeling safe sharing opinions on what is going on in the world and opinions on other art – what we like and what we don’t like – it’s okay to have an opinion – without fearing we exist solely to be mined – our vulnerabilities derided. Athena and June were supposedly friends, but they didn’t really know each other. Nor did Dorland and Larson. Ultimately, only the people involved in a relationship know the sincerity of it, beneath layers of performance. The market might not care about us, but we can all cultivate some care by striving towards less performative and extractive, more meaningful connections with each other.