Your skill will be whatever it is you’re doing differently.

November 28, 2018 3:12 PM

How to Be an Artist: 33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively).

Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine's art critic, offers steps, lessons, and exercises in this order:

Step One: You Are a Total Amateur
Step Two: How to Actually Begin
Step Three: Learn How to Think Like an Artist
Step Four: Enter the Art World
Step Five: Survive the Art World
Step Six: Attain Galactic Brain

Some recent previouslies about Saltz's art writing here and here.

posted by witchen (8 comments total)

Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
I think all artists should:
• Build a clay pot.
• Sew pieces of fabric together.
• Prune a tree.
• Make a wooden bowl on a lathe, by carving.
• Make a lithograph, etching, or woodblock print.
• Make one hokey Dalí-like painting or mini Kusama light installation to get this out of your system.

You are now in possession of ancient secret knowledge.

This is filled with some real gems. Thank you for posting it.
posted by nightrecordings at 3:24 PM on November 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

One of my better teachers once said to me, (think rule 34,) "Don't quit your day job." Doing that puts an undo strain on the artistic process, and getting stressed out over art making, hurts your art. Some artists make a living at it. But, making art does not have to enter the realm of money. Getting paid for your art is a great feeling, and sometimes you do get paid.
posted by Oyéah at 3:25 PM on November 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

Getting paid for your art is a great feeling, and sometimes you do get paid.

True, that! I actually grossed more selling my art in October than I made net at my day job. Sure, once you account for materials costs, taxes, vendor fees, and so on, the number comes out to be (way) less, but damn is that wasn't a salve to the constant naggling impostor syndrome I experience. I almost immediately reinvested in further projects - I built a new workbench, ordered some t-shirts and patches, and restocked materials. Of course I fantasized about quitting my job and arting full time, but managed to quell that by spending too much money at a Swedish UFO library's booksale, something I could not do if I was carving to pay a mortgage.

I stumbled into some good opportunities this past year, but being new and largely self-taught-by-doing, I'm pretty sure I bungled moving things on to the next stage. My hope is that similar will come around again if I keep plugging away.

One thing this list avoids, though, is the downside of even slight success - the bookkeeping and recordkeeping and social mediaing and so on that can swell up and swallow your passion. My website has not been updated in years, YEARS!, and it really needs to be as it's not as reflective of my focus and skill as it once was. But sitting down to battle with SquareSpace even in its easiest of drag-and-drop forms when I could be carving is just soul-grinding. The same goes for keeping up to date with social media (gotta have a presence as that's how people find you and you find out about events) and the constant stream of content required. There comes a point, I guess, where you need to get passion about the stuff that supports your passion, but dang if that ain't easy.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:17 PM on November 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

I thought about making an FPP of this, but will just link it here instead:

How to balance full-time work with creative projects

Lots of great advice there on a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately.
posted by naju at 4:25 PM on November 28, 2018 [21 favorites]

I'm just gonna come in here and be cranky and upset about how structural oppression impacts people of color artists, especially queer trans people of color artists. There's a lot of white money swirling around, but sympathy more than money flows our way, and we aren't considered or proposed for the same opportunities. Pay artists, yeah, but especially seek out those who are marginalized and don't get the attention they should, for brilliant ideas that they have work 10 times as hard to get out there, and often gets co-opted by white people anyway (ex. Lena Dunham, Scarlett Johansson, pretty much every white guy who fetishes and culturally appropriates some aspect of culture.)
posted by yueliang at 5:48 PM on November 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

I enjoyed this because most every nitpicking quibble I had got dealt with later on at some point, although I totally agree with yueliang that it treats the exclusionary whiteness of the “art world” with kid gloves to its detriment. The exercises are refreshingly useful, though, as well as its emphasis on engaging with your own discomfort with yourself as a person and the sort of self-censorship you might engage in as a result.
posted by invitapriore at 7:47 PM on November 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is good, thanks for posting it. I forwarded it to a friend that is an amateur artist.

It asks a good question, too:

When, last month, Banksy jerry-rigged a frame to shred a painting just when it was auctioned, I could almost hear the whispers: “Is that art?”

"No. That's marketing."
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 6:48 AM on November 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

No. That's marketing.

Under neoliberalism, all cultural activity falls under "marketing".
posted by acb at 7:37 AM on November 29, 2018 [7 favorites]