The Salon was the most important art show in the world. Everyone at the Café Guerbois agreed on that. But the acceptance by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work. Was it worth it? Night after night, the Impressionists argued over whether they should keep knocking on the Salon door or strike out on their own and stage a show just for themselves. Did they want to be a Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon or a Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own choosing?
In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend university.
2.
Caroline Sacks1 grew up on the farthest fringes of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. She went to public schools through high school. Her mother is an accountant and her father works for a technology company. As a child she sang in the church choir and loved to write and draw. But what really excited her was science.
“I did a lot of crawling around in the grass with a magnifying glass and a sketchbook, following bugs and drawing them,” Sacks says. She is a thoughtful and articulate young woman, with a refreshing honesty and directness. “I was really, really into bugs. And sharks. So for a while I thought I was going to be a veterinarian or an ichthyologist. Eugenie Clark was my hero. She was the first woman diver. She grew up in New York City in a family of immigrants and ended up rising to the top of her field, despite having a lot of ‘Oh, you’re a woman, you can’t go under the ocean’ setbacks. I just thought she was great. My dad met her and was able to give me a signed photo and I was really excited. Science was always a really big part of what I did.”
Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her class. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant calculus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every class she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Placement pre-college courses.
The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universities. “I think we looked at five schools in three days,” she says. “It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Boston College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn’t fit the vibe.” But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in.
“I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me—intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they’d be able to make friends. It was very reassuring.” The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a class called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as “sort of half botany class, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on.” She was in heaven.
3.
Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of American colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Brown routinely places among the top ten or twenty colleges in the United States. The University of Maryland finishes much farther back in the pack.
But let’s think about Caroline’s decision in the same way the Impressionists thought about the Salon. What the Impressionists understood, in their endless debates at the Café Guerbois, was that the choice between the Salon and a solo show wasn’t a simple case of a best option and a second-best option. It was a choice between two very different options, each with its own strengths and drawbacks.
The Salon was a lot like an Ivy League school. It was the place where reputations were made. And what made it special was how selective it was. There were roughly three thousand painters of “national reputation” in France in the 1860s, and each submitted two or three of his best works to the Salon, which meant the jury was picking from a small mountain of canvases. Rejection was the norm. Getting in was a feat. “The Salon is the real field of battle,” Manet said. “It’s there that one must take one’s measure.” Of all the Impressionists, he was the one most convinced of the value of the Salon. The art critic Théodore Duret, another of the Guerbois circle, agreed. “You have still one step to take,” Duret wrote to Pissarro in 1874. “That is to succeed in becoming known to the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers.…I urge you to exhibit; you must succeed in making a noise, in defying and attracting criticism, coming face-to-face with the big public.”
But the very things that made the Salon so attractive—how selective and prestigious it was—also made it problematic. The Palais was an enormous barn of a building three hundred yards long with a central aisle that was two stories high. A typical Salon might accept three or four thousand paintings, and they were hung in four tiers, starting at ground level and stretching up to the ceiling. Only paintings that met with the unanimous approval of the jury were hung “on the line,” at eye level. If you were “skyed”—that is, hung closest to the ceiling—it was all but impossible for your painting to be seen. (One of Renoir’s paintings was once skyed in the dépotoir.) No painter could submit more than three works. The crowds were often overwhelming. The Salon was the Big Pond. But it was very hard to be anything at the Salon but a Little Fish.
Pissarro and Monet disagreed with Manet. They thought it made more sense to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond. If they were off by themselves and held their own show, they said, they wouldn’t be bound by the restrictive rules of the Salon, where Olympia was considered an outrage and where the medals were won by paintings of soldiers and weeping women. They could paint whatever they wanted. And they wouldn’t get lost in the crowd, because there wouldn’t be a crowd. In 1873, Pissarro and Monet proposed that the Impressionists set up a collective called the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs. There would be no competition, no juries, and no medals. Every artist would be treated as an equal. Everyone but Manet was in.
The group found space on the Boulevard des Capucines on the top floor of a building that had just been vacated by a photographer. It was a series of small rooms with red-brown walls. The Impressionists’ exhibition opened on April 15, 1874, and lasted one month. The entrance fee was one franc. There were 165 works of art on display, including three Cézannes, ten paintings by Degas, nine Monets, five Pissarros, six Renoirs, and five by Alfred Sisley—a tiny fraction of what was on the walls of the Salon across town. In their show, the Impressionists co
uld exhibit as many canvases as they wished and hang them in a way that allowed people to actually see them. “The Impressionists were lost in the mass of Salon paintings, even when accepted,” the art historians Harrison White and Cynthia White write. “With…the independent group show, they could gain the public’s eye.”
Thirty-five hundred people attended the show—175 on the first day alone, which was enough to bring the artists critical attention. Not all of that attention was positive: one joke told was that what the Impressionists were doing was loading a pistol with paint and firing at the canvas. But that was the second part of the Big Fish–Little Pond bargain. The Big Fish–Little Pond option might be scorned by some on the outside, but Small Ponds are welcoming places for those on the inside. They have all of the support that comes from community and friendship—and they are places where innovation and individuality are not frowned upon. “We are beginning to make ourselves a niche,” a hopeful Pissarro wrote to a friend. “We have succeeded as intruders in setting up our little banner in the midst of the crowd.” Their challenge was “to advance without worrying about opinion.” He was right. Off by themselves, the Impressionists found a new identity. They felt a new creative freedom, and before long, the outside world began to sit up and take notice. In the history of modern art, there has never been a more important or more famous exhibition. If you tried to buy the paintings in that warren of top-floor rooms today, it would cost you more than a billion dollars.
The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all. Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne weighed prestige against visibility, selectivity against freedom, and decided the costs of the Big Pond were too great. Caroline Sacks faced the same choice. She could be a Big Fish at the University of Maryland, or a Little Fish at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. She chose the Salon over the three rooms on Boulevard des Capucines—and she ended up paying a high price.
4.
The trouble for Caroline Sacks began in the spring of her freshman year, when she enrolled in chemistry. She was probably taking too many courses, she realizes now, and doing too many extracurricular activities. She got her grade on her third midterm exam, and her heart sank. She went to talk to the professor. “He ran me through some exercises, and he said, ‘Well, you have a fundamental deficiency in some of these concepts, so what I would actually recommend is that you drop the class, not bother with the final exam, and take the course again next fall.’” So she did what the professor suggested. She retook the course in the fall of her sophomore year. But she barely did any better. She got a low B. She was in shock. “I had never gotten a B in an academic context before,” she said. “I had never not excelled. And I was taking the class for the second time, this time as a sophomore, and most of the kids in the class were first-semester freshmen. It was pretty disheartening.”
She had known when she was accepted to Brown that it wasn’t going to be like high school. It couldn’t be. She wasn’t going to be the smartest girl in the class anymore—and she’d accepted that fact. “I figured, regardless of how much I prepared, there would be kids who had been exposed to stuff I had never even heard of. So I was trying not to be naive about that.” But chemistry was beyond what she had imagined. The students in her class were competitive. “I had a lot of trouble even talking with people from those classes,” she went on. “They didn’t want to share their study habits with me. They didn’t want to talk about ways to better understand the stuff that we were learning, because that might give me a leg up.”
In spring of her sophomore year, she enrolled in organic chemistry—and things only got worse. She couldn’t do it: “You memorize how a concept works, and then they give you a molecule you’ve never seen before, and they ask you to make another one you’ve never seen before, and you have to get from this thing to that thing. There are people who just think that way and in five minutes are done. They’re the curve busters. Then there are people who through an amazing amount of hard work trained themselves to think that way. I worked so hard and I never got it down.” The teacher would ask a question, and around her, hands would go up, and Sacks would sit in silence and listen to everyone else’s brilliant answers. “It was just this feeling of overwhelming inadequacy.”
One night she stayed up late, preparing for a review session in organic chemistry. She was miserable and angry. She didn’t want to be working on organic chemistry at three in the morning, when all of that work didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. “I guess that was when I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t pursue this any further,” she said. She’d had enough.
The tragic part was that Sacks loved science. As she talked about her abandonment of her first love, she mourned all the courses she would have loved to take but now never would—physiology, infectious disease, biology, math. In the summer after her sophomore year, she agonized over her decision: “When I was growing up, it was a subject of much pride to be able to say that, you know, ‘I’m a seven-year-old girl, and I love bugs! And I want to study them, and I read up on them all the time, and I draw them in my sketchbook and label all the different parts of them and talk about where they live and what they do.’ Later it was ‘I am so interested in people and how the human body works, and isn’t this amazing?’ There is definitely a sort of pride that goes along with ‘I am a science girl,’ and it’s almost shameful for me to leave that behind and say, ‘Oh, well, I am going to do something easier because I can’t take the heat.’ For a while, that is the only way I was looking at it, like I have completely failed. This has been my goal and I can’t do it.”
And it shouldn’t have mattered how Sacks did in organic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an organic chemist. It was just a course. Lots of people find organic chemistry impossible. It’s not uncommon for premed students to take organic chemistry over the summer at another college just to give themselves a full semester of practice. What’s more, Sacks was taking organic chemistry at an extraordinarily competitive and academically rigorous university. If you were to rank all the students in the world who are taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably be in the 99th percentile.
But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner.”
5.
Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts.
But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps.
On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. S
o, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so you weren’t that unhappy.
“Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system.”
Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2