I recently came across a video online of an interview with Lady Gaga, an artist who I admire more than I can even begin to explain, through the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Gaga touched on several different subjects over the course of this interview, and the video can be found in its entirety here, but for the purposes of this article, I would like to focus on her discussion of how she regained her passion for her work after feeling that she had lost herself. First, she had to pinpoint the problem:
I have had to make decisions like, ok, why am I unhappy? “Ok, ok Stefani/Gaga hybrid person, why are you unhappy? Why is it that you wanna quit music?” a couple years ago. And I was like “well, I really don’t like selling these, you know, fragrances, perfumes. I don’t like wasting my time spending days just shaking people’s hands and smiling and taking selfies. It feels shallow to my existence. I have a lot more to offer than my image. I don’t like being used to make people money. I feel sad when I’m over worked and that I’ve just become a money-making machine and that my passion and my creativity take a back seat. That makes me unhappy.“
For any artist, for any human being, this would be powerful set of discoveries to make about oneself, but even more powerful was Gaga’s response to these personal revelations:
So what did I do? I started to say, “No. I’m not doing that. I don’t wanna do that. I’m not taking that picture. I’m not going to that event. I’m not standing by that because that’s not what I stand for.” And slowly but surely I remembered who I am.
What Gaga is talking about, here, is something I have always liked to call “artistic integrity”, and it means creating in a way that feeds your soul as an artist and a as human being. Having artistic integrity means you do and create things that are important to you, and that you do and create them for reasons that are important to you. That way, there is never anything empty or void of meaning about your work. Artistic integrity is the key to each and every artist remaining true to his or her identity as a performer, dancer, writer, painter, whatever. It helps to maintain one’s passion for the work because the work is never old or stale, and it is certainly never shallow. Most of all, having artistic integrity means that you will never have to look in the mirror and see a sell out looking back at you. In Gaga’s own words, “You look in the mirror and you’re like ‘Yes, I can go to bed with YOU every night,’ because that person, I know that person…that person has integrity.”
