In 1956 Studs Terkel wrote of Billie Holiday:

When she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me,’ you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of the self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

Whether the difference between being an artist and being an entertainer is the willingness to reveal one’s self is open to discussion, but there certainly is an easily observable difference between the two.

In acting classes and workshops that I lead, it has become a topic of discussion. Seldom do you hear a young actor say “I want to create art.” More often, you hear, “I want to be a star,” or “I want to entertain people,” or sometimes, “I just want to do good work.” Whether the goal is to be an entertainer or an artist is not just an academic question. It is an important question that informs the choices that that actor makes during his career path.

While the basic skill set for the person who wants to create dramatic art and the person who is concerned with dramatic entertainment are much the same, the measurements of success and the rewards of the two goals are very, very different. Artists, taken as a group, probably can expect to make less money and will certainly make very different choices, and travel a path different from those who consider themselves primarily entertainers.

A recent Chicago Tribune article profiled Chicago actor Will Kiley who works in a storefront theatre for no pay for artistic reasons; he said, “I did some industrial voice-over stuff, and for two hours of work I got paid a couple thousand dollars…but that work felt artistically shallow and super-easy.” So in order to pursue his artistic needs, he works two day jobs to support himself, and at night he says he will “work my tail off on a storefront show, which is what I want to be doing, and get paid in, you know, beer.”

It’s the difference between Daniel Day Lewis and John Wayne or Gary Oldman and Sylvester Stallone or Bob Dylan and Gene Simmons. It’s not about audience appeal or fame; it’s a matter of the direction a performer wants to take.

And this choice of direction exists in arts beyond acting and music. This decision is one that every person in the arts must make at one time or the other. There are analogous paths in each of the arts. For writers there are choices besides novels and poems, and for visual artists there are numerous choices. Sometimes the choices intertwine and overlap; many times they do not.

One choice is not necessarily better than another, and certainly either choice or some combination is valid. And these choices are not necessarily mutually exclusive. However, it seems to me that, realistically speaking, it is a choice that must be made because wherever an individual wants to go, it’s much easier to get there if the individual knows what direction he/she is going early on in the journey.

We all have all have our comfort zones. Such zones can be physical, referring to space, time, environmental condition. They can be psychological, religious, philosophical, or even artistic. Many will debate the pros and cons of remaining a comfort zone in almost all of these areas—except artistic. If we are in an artistic comfort zone, we may soon find ourselves in artistic trouble.

Many of us have gone through several stages of development before finding ourselves in an artistic comfort zone. But once we’re there, we are inclined to stay put. Comfort zones are, by definition, nice places to be. We are without tension, stress, and particularly fear, all things that are said to hinder creativity.

And the absence of tension, stress, and fear is not the total benefit of such a place. In a comfort zone, we are not only lacking those negative things, we feel a positive contentment. What we do is “good enough” and may actually be good. Probably it is not great; probably it is not what it could be if we were to push a little. What it is is comfortable. The art we make there is satisfying in some—or perhaps many ways. It may even be fresh and new. It may be selling. It may not seem to be lacking in any way.

But it is. If we are producing good work and are comfortable with it, what’s wrong with that? Nothing—if that’s what we want to do. The problem is that when we are comfortable, we have a tendency to preserve the status quo because it feels so good. And that feeling good can lead to complacency, and complacency is a danger to any artist who wants to move forward, to say something, to impact his/her audience.

Complacency almost demands that we produce things that are not challenging to us. And if we do nothing challenging, we neither develop nor mature. As an unattributed quote that that I ran across last week says, “A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.” And therein lies the potential trouble.

If we want to grow as artists, if we want to produce work that is better than good, work that is outstanding and amazing and ground-breaking, we will have to move out of that comfort zone.

The question then becomes how to break free of this comfortable prison and produce more meaningful work. The answer is that we force ourselves, and the easiest way to do that is to take on a project that involves risk.

Risk is, of course, the antithesis of comfort. When we risk, we must acknowledge the possibility that we may not succeed. People who are content with being comfortable do not risk, because of the potential of producing something that our audience may not like, and thus the possibility of failure.

Risk is required for growth, and the problem with a comfort zone is that it does not allow that. If we want to make better art, we would do better to invite the possibility of failure which comes with the potential of amazing success than to die the slow sure death of complacency in the comfort zone.