Posts tagged: Art
- On insuring your art and workspace
- Most of the time, renter’s, homeowner’s or condo owner’s insurance are for personal considerations, not commercial. Therefore, understanding whether or not your art is a hobby or a business is key to understanding whether or not you need any additional insurance policies for your art business. If it’s a hobby, then you may be covered. [...] [9 Jul 2010]
- On “protest art”
- Protest art always ends up being trendy precisely because the art necessarily struggles to be accepted by the very people the art should oppose. Ultimately, protest artists are, by definition, more interested in relating to the enemy than relating to the potential insurgents. This is why we have protest artists whose cutting edge work is [...] [6 Jul 2010]
- On art movements and outsiders
- The myth of an avant-garde serves the same market forces avant-gardism pretends to overthrow. Art may challenge authority … But art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself, and never has, not in 19th-century France or 20th-century Russia or 21st-century China or Iran. Even when it manages to tilt popular thinking, it still ends up within [...] [18 Apr 2010]
- On Resistance
- Resistance is what you begin to embody when the culture changes and you find that you stand for values that are no longer fashionable. … I don’t get up the morning and decide to resist. But I have an impulse towards critical speech and then the culture resists me. That is the counterintuitive truth about [...] [17 Apr 2010]
- On Talent
- Let’s not worry about whether you have talent. Talent is a nonissue. It can be neither measured nor defined, and agonizing over it serves no purpose other than to create both anxiety and, if you’ve developed a talent for worrying, an excuse for avoiding work. From the introduction to Taking the Leap: Building a Career [...] [6 Apr 2010]
- On art, class and politics
- The art world is not reflective of any entire society. It represents the tolerant and pluralistic factions that encourage—and even celebrate—difference and dissent. On one hand, as Davis points out, this can be a symbolic release valve for class differences, but it is also reflective of the moral and ethical differences that fracture the societal [...] [19 Mar 2010]
- Krista Thompson “Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels” and thoughts on class and aesthetics
- For the record: I now want to be besties with Krista Thompson, the 2009 winner of the David C. Driskell Prize and Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. Her recent High Museum lecture, “Of Shine, Bling and Bixels: Toward a Post-Soul Art History,” blew me away with its analysis of contemporary artist Kehinde [...] [13 Mar 2010]
- On creativity and business
- Creativity is usually thought of as internally motivated — a response to a deeply felt personal urge to challenge convention, push boundaries and explore. But newly published research suggests that, at least in the business world, the link between inspiration and ingenuity is strengthened by focusing on the needs of others. From Empathy Conducive to [...] [18 Feb 2010]
- On writing and relationships
- One common bond linking McCarthy, Jackson, and Stein — three women featured in Elaine Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers — is that their spouses allowed them the time and solitude required to imagine, write, and produce. Even if their spouses’ approaches were controlling or their motivations questionable, the writing [...] [1 Feb 2010]
- Lessons I learned by making art
- There are three: Mistakes can be the catalyst for something beautiful. The piece above is a perfect example. I was going for an entirely different effect when I realized it didn’t look so good. So I took a paper towel and wiped off the layer of burnt umber I had just painted. It two left [...] [30 Jan 2010]