So vulnerable, I have to be sincere. European and American art galleries historically are not only promoters of great art, they are creators of markets. That may be where you could shift focus.
Your worth is that you are young, eating rat, living a life of passion, filth, messiness, body horror (per my comment on such) unique and unknown to those with money. They crave you, not for your art. That's worthless to them. The art, as photographs per Sontag in my other rec, is simply a receipt that they owned a piece of your lifestyle for a moment. No one who will buy your art will likely give a fuck about your art. Stop seeking those. Find the Glengarry Glen Ross customers seeking life, escape from drudgery, a need to prove something to themselves. Let your art be that for them.
Enough bs theory, now for implementation. You won't sell your art, but you can sell the frustration, bloodsweattears, dedication, sacrifice that drips from your post. You can do so by simultaneously reminding yourself you are not creating ART but CREATING art. Your work and worth is not on a canvas. It's not the art. It's in you, the artist.
May 11, 2024
Related Recs
I have always adored art ever since I was in preschool. I loved creating characters or even doing my own renditions on characters and movies.
I even took time during lockdown to work on my interest, putting in hours of learning anatomy and structure.
However for a while I've been in a slump of sorts, I've lost creativity and the fuel to continue.
It's been hard, especially since drawing and creating is something I've been putting effort to what seems like eons at this point. I even decided to just quit altogether and pursue something else as a dream career.
There had become a point where my boyfriend gave me a pep talk and to prove his point he had read me a book he wad reading for philosophy called 'The Republic';
"All great things are precarious... Beautiful things really are difficult" and in his own words told me -
"It occurs often throughout the text, anything that is easy will never be beautiful, for if it is easy it won't have the scars and marks of something built through struggle, those scars and marks are the cracks through which beautiful shines most brightly", which I think helped me.
For the past month in my art class I've been researching a style called 'Jugendstil' and got a bit of inspiration again. I want to show off what I made because I'm genuinely happy with my product since a hot minute.
Anyways moral of the story, don't beat yourself up if you don't find something about you or what you make up to your standards, because beautiful things take time.
Feb 27, 2025
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Just read a tweet about the futility of trying to replicate the technicolor style using modern mechanisms. Ended with “The process is the style” (linked)
As an artist, i worry often about the style of my work. Is it consistent, clear, or novel? I don’t know!!!! Focusing on my process, as the tweet says, is how the sausage gets made, so to speak (… how the style is developed). I need to remind myself of this often, lest I fall victim to anxious inactivity 😁
Jun 8, 2024
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There's a thing that I notice at art museums sometimes. Someone wearing a slightly annoyed expression will be speeding through the exhibit like they are going down a long to do list. Or I'll be playing a board game with a group and there will be some guy with a strained face looking like they'd rather be anywhere else. Maybe another time we're leaving a movie and they start to complain about how it 'wasn't realistic', you get the picture.
I swear to God it makes me want to pulpify their face.
I'm not saying that you need to like every piece of art or that you should feel bad for not liking a movie, but, goddamn, at least give it a fucking second. Closing yourself off to The New, being automatically opposed to earnestness when it appears, is one of the most damaging defense mechanisms I can think of. It is, in turn, also one of the best ways to maximize your misery.
The defense mechanism that is cynicism, turns its users into parasites of the Social; they are sold the idea (a lie) that damaging and denigrating <<something>> allows one to become independent of its power structure. On the contrary, just as a leech is the most dependent on its host, cynics are those that are most dependent on the power structures in our culture.
I really want to emphasize the difference between criticism and cynicism, because I am in no way saying that we should not criticize bad or damaging art, but to successfully criticize something means to first buy in, to really allow yourself to be taken by a piece, to examine it as it comes. Buying in as a term (even one so bathed in capitalist sebum) is the right one in this case because to buy in requires one to make a sacrifice. You cannot experience art without opening yourself to the possibility that it will do damage to you. To fully allow yourself to be moved by a piece of art is to allow yourself to be cut.
But inside that cut is what it means to be human.
I think the single best way to combat cynicism is an unceasing curiosity of the world and the people in it. The normal and common of this world is absolutely fantasmatic if you take a moment to examine it; we see the world through have fluid filled orbs made of meat for fucks sake. The fact that there is anything at all, the fact that you and I exist for even a second is an absolutely unbelievable mind fuck, and to be unimpressed by any and everything doesn’t make you special or better than anyone, it just leaves you on a road to the pit of despair and leaves me really bummed out for the rest of the night.
Sep 20, 2024
Top Recs from @indianjones
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Oct 13, 2024
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A model friend/client and I stepped out from dinner for a smoke and were having a tipsy discussion about an issue with her company. Some doorman came up to tell us to move because we were blocking the entrance, which we weren't. I was irked, but my friend guessed he likely stereotyped her being in a lover's quarrel. Irked for a different reason, I called out, "Dude, we're discussing business! She's my boss!" In hindsight, I appreciated how he handled what he mistook as a domestic dispute by creating a false diversion to redirect our attention.
Most people get involved in others' drama because they think they know better. Most people don't because they're insecure they're misunderstanding. He was appropriately in between.
Jun 5, 2024
May 19, 2024