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Artists must be allowed to make bad work

austinkleon.com

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean that it is written in contrived manner. I mean that it is vague. There is no context, there is only a clickbait title.

> I mean that it is vague. There is no context, there is only a clickbait title. If you can't parse the context from the writing, there is no context for you.

It seems like you can’t parse the context of my writing and the problem lies way deeper than your level of English.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#42
Social pressure is not higher now than in the other periods, when art could be called degenerate or heresy. Newspapers were influential and before them it was church and favoritism in the high society. Van Gogh, Mark Rothko and many others were not happy people who enjoyed a lot of support from the public. We do not know the names of artists from earlier periods who vanished because they were not understood. Suffering is the fuel of art. Take your broken heart and make it into art - that’s how it works. If the pressure of social media is painful, you cannot do anything with it, so either you create or find something else to do, as it has always been.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#43
post #33

There’s even a museum for them: https://museumofbadart.org/

Execution is lagging here it would be more fruitful if we would see Vince Van Gogh or Pablo Picasso bad work rather than just some noname artists.

Yeah, I know. It was just a joke.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#44
post #10

That's the free market pressure. The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. And it is by many believed to be a good thing, because it's very meritocratic. But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocrat…

> The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.

Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable. Da Vinci has, clearly, a monopoly on original items from Da Vinci.

So if you're an artist and people value your name, regardless of the product it's written on, you don't have the OP's problem. The problem described only applies if the consumer can get some other art that gives them equivalent satisfaction.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#45
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true. Almost all the value will be because it's attributed to da Vinci. You simply won't get the same valuation if it's attributed to a lesser known contemporary. And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical. There's a whole subset of the art…

Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off. > There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.

The vast majority of art sold is for decorative purposes and is valued as such. There is a subset though that's sold primarily based on provenance.

Or to put it another way, most art sold isn't in urinal form.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean that it is written in contrived manner. I mean that it is vague. There is no context, there is only a clickbait title.

> I mean that it is vague. There is no context, there is only a clickbait title. If you can't parse the context from the writing, there is no context for you.

you are behaving quite patronising to this guy for no reason. He is challenging the premise of the piece and you are telling him he is too stupid to read the piece at all.

Do you not see the irony here? Commenters, too, should be allowed to have bad takes

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#47
post #3

Scientists, too. Anyone, really; fail faster, people! Celebrate the process of trial and error.

Engineers and doctors and nurses... Eh... Maybe not so fast...

My grandfather, a photographer, told me this story: 20 years ago in a doctor's graduation ceremony held somewhere in Spain the old doctor who gave the speech told the graduates: "Now your job is to kill people. Along the years you'll learn, and if you are good, you'll kill less people and save some."

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#48

"Must be allowed to” sounds like a weasel word. It is not illegal to make bad work. I doubt any contract an artist signs usually has a clause against producing bad work either. That phrase may sound sophisticated and provocative but it means nothing, at least to me.

To my mind "must be allowed to" an English idiom. The "must" is a form of exaggeration, the effect being that the speaker is acknowledging that they are stating an opinion.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true. Almost all the value will be because it's attributed to da Vinci. You simply won't get the same valuation if it's attributed to a lesser known contemporary. And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical. There's a whole subset of the art…

Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off. > There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.

> I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning.

I've never "understood art", but when you phrased it like that it makes perfect sense. To me, provenance just isn't interesting. So I judge the pieces as they stand in front of me.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#50
It's difficult for me to reason this sort of thing. Success, or even just being able to scrape out a living from art seems like a lottery. That is, there's not really any strong correlation between talent, effort and success. Plenty of starving, yet talented and/or hard-working artists. And plenty of successful artists with less talent or effort than their starving peers. So in this case, pushing for an environment that allows for bad periods is really only trying to improve things for those that won that initial lottery.
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