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Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

artsy.net

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Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get the music world and how it works? It's very similar, and someone who didn't get music could make the exact same arguments you're making. The visual arts take a tiny bit more effort to get into but once you're over that hump it's very similar.

Of which kind of music are we talking about? If you mean some art of abstract music or music that gets approved from some elite circle, I would indeed make the same arguments and don't see a flaw. My main point is that there is no objective comparison between thousand of pieces and when we take the choices of the elite circle and compare it to intersubjective choices of the masses there would be little to no overlapp…

All music.

> My main point is that there is no objective comparison between thousand of pieces and when we take the choices of the elite circle and compare it to intersubjective choices of the masses there would be little to no overlapping. So my point would still be "Why is your elite opinion more worth or correct than the collective opinion of the whole world?"

Exactly. This is more or less the same in the music world as it is in the visual arts.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#52

I printed this HN comment out about 3 years ago and still have it on my wall as motivation. It's from an article about a lifelong artist that never quite "made it" and I think it is a good answer to the question. Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and acc…

Susan Sontag sums up the ultimate social achievement of the artist well. It's about the Aesthetics of Silence. The more withdrawn an artist becomes, the more celebrated. The ultimate level according to her, is not communicating, and not even creating anything.

> So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

– Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#54
post #30

I printed this HN comment out about 3 years ago and still have it on my wall as motivation. It's from an article about a lifelong artist that never quite "made it" and I think it is a good answer to the question. Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and acc…

By "this guy", I take it you're referring just to the guy from the original piece. Basquiat very much created a myth about his life -- partly in collaboration with Andy Warhol, one of the greatest self-mythmakers in the art world. I don't mean to diminish Basquiat's art or his story. I'm just affirming (by way of clarifying) what you said: the artist's life is a part of their art, and part of what you pay for.

It's not my comment, I was just quoting it. But yes, the original commenter meant the man in the article.
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