There’s a new book I’ve been meaning to check out, by Seattle author Fred Moody, called Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story. In it, Moody describes this town’s love-hate relationship with success, from the 1890s Klondike gold rush to the 1990s dot-com rush. After living in Seattle for several years, I’m just starting to see what he’s talking about. Clearly Seattle sometimes does reach for the stars, but it always seems to come back to earth, which leads me to believe that we Seattleites are more comfortable down here among the evergreens. This is a tough line for a start-up like the Shunpike to tread: How do you grow in a town that wants you to stay close to the ground? In other words, how do we inject more ambition into Seattle’s art scene?

Last fall, local musician-journalist Sean Nelson wrote in The Stranger that a mild war had broken out in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood when Café Ladro, an espresso “chain” with seven stores, opened up down the block from Victrola, a single-store company. Was Ladro getting too big, too corporate, Nelson wondered? Was it on its way to being another Starbucks? That kind of ambition doesn’t sit well with Seattle types. No one around here admits to going to Starbucks anymore. We like to think small. When the city started to boom 30 years ago, some prickly residents even started an organization called “Lesser Seattle” to limit growth. Take that, ambition!

This attitude is a chronic virus in Seattle’s art world. Resisting ambition has created a lack of professionalism. Everyone’s a hobbyist or a dabbler: Work at Microsoft by day; act, paint, or write when you get home. Some people say you can’t make a living as an artist here, but that seems self-fulfilling to me. Being a professional means, by definition, that you create something of value. To get there, we just need to be more comfortable with our own ambition, which, Moody admits, is hiding somewhere, even if it only comes out as rarely as the sunshine.

Underground (i.e., alternative, cutting-edge, etc.) art in Seattle is divided into two camps. The first, which I’ll call “Indie-Slacker,” is characterized by heavy doses of irony, crude sexuality and lots of self-deprecating, in-club humor. The second, “Hippy-Raver,” seems to focus more on participatory art like costume parties, mind-expanding DJs and affection for the Burning Man festival. One’s too sarcastic; the other’s too sincere. The Indie-Slackers seem to get all the good press, but that seems to be because they know all the art critics (or, too often, they are the art critics). The Hippy-Ravers are better self-promoters, but the critics never take them seriously because their work tends to be inscrutable outside the tight-knit love-in community that surrounds it. Both camps are destined to keep their day jobs because they can’t transcend their respective communities and reach for something larger. Being a professional artist means creating art that can be appreciated outside of your circle of friends.

I certainly don’t mean to paint all artists with the same brush. There are, to be sure, many skilled professional artists working in Seattle. I admire their ambition. For many of the rest, there’s a real sense that there’s a ceiling in Seattle—only so far you can go before you must embark for New York or L.A. and a real shot at a professional career. I don’t buy it. The more Seattle’s artists start taking themselves and their city seriously, the more they work to transcend their various niche markets and work to create something of value, the sooner that glass ceiling will disappear. The arts are an important part of the local economy. Indeed, it’s a big part of what put Seattle on the map in the last decade. Staying serious, demanding nothing less than excellence, and valuing craftsmanship above all else will ensure that we stay there.