The Middle Path Between Idiots and Opposites
1. Walk the line between challenging and connecting with your audience.
2. In the two extremes of only being challenging and only connecting, there lies stagnation: the latter in giving the audience only what it wants, and the former in the exhaustion of constantly being challenging coupled with the exhaustion of your audience’s patience.
3. Make the challenge an invitation, not a threat. Advertising and politics are full of (implied) threats: make your work distinct from these fields in its methodology.
4. If your audience has to read copious amounts of text before understanding your work, your work has failed in and of itself to communicate the message. An accompanying text should accompany, not justify or explain.
5. The greatest works of art are timeless and universal in their appeal. Examples: Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Guernica, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
6. Seek to speak outside of your time – both past and future – and to as many people as possible.
7. Allow the inspiration behind your work to flow and respond, rather than be forced or reactive. Example: The Stuckist Manifesto as a reaction to Tracey Emin’s outburst against painting.
8. Don’t bullshit your audience through your text. Know what it is you are trying to express in your work, and speak of it plainly. Never mind that the ‘industry’ wants you to speak academically, for ultimately you are not speaking to the industry.
9. Don’t be childish with your thoughts. If someone is telling you that ‘Painting is the medium of yesterday’, ask them if everyone burnt their cars when the space shuttle launched. Consistency across all human practices (art, technology, etc) is key in your approach.
10. Make your practice additive, not exclusive. Painting is not dead. Video is not the new painting. Video can be added to painting to make a new fusion of ideas and sensations. This should be obvious to all artists.
11. ‘In opposition to’ is never a useful way to proceed. Any work produced from this standpoint will only reflect the opposition, and not the totality. Witness your Flesh piece, created as a response to, but not in opposition to, the idea that we are defined only by our flesh. Flesh still figured strongly in the work.
12. The word spiritual as used by the visionary and remodernist artists, is heavy, and often functions as a schematic unknown. Everyone thinks they know what spirit is, but no one can say. Be wary of it, it can signify laziness, both of intellect and (ah ha ha) spirit. Remain open to the presence and experience of it nonetheless, just do not speak of it much in your texts.
13. Be careful of commerce, and of being revolutionary. Revolutionary art and commercial art have in common that the former becomes the latter, and both often end up on the dustbin of history. Revolutions always come around again.
14. Transcendental not incidental…
2. In the two extremes of only being challenging and only connecting, there lies stagnation: the latter in giving the audience only what it wants, and the former in the exhaustion of constantly being challenging coupled with the exhaustion of your audience’s patience.
3. Make the challenge an invitation, not a threat. Advertising and politics are full of (implied) threats: make your work distinct from these fields in its methodology.
4. If your audience has to read copious amounts of text before understanding your work, your work has failed in and of itself to communicate the message. An accompanying text should accompany, not justify or explain.
5. The greatest works of art are timeless and universal in their appeal. Examples: Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Guernica, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
6. Seek to speak outside of your time – both past and future – and to as many people as possible.
7. Allow the inspiration behind your work to flow and respond, rather than be forced or reactive. Example: The Stuckist Manifesto as a reaction to Tracey Emin’s outburst against painting.
8. Don’t bullshit your audience through your text. Know what it is you are trying to express in your work, and speak of it plainly. Never mind that the ‘industry’ wants you to speak academically, for ultimately you are not speaking to the industry.
9. Don’t be childish with your thoughts. If someone is telling you that ‘Painting is the medium of yesterday’, ask them if everyone burnt their cars when the space shuttle launched. Consistency across all human practices (art, technology, etc) is key in your approach.
10. Make your practice additive, not exclusive. Painting is not dead. Video is not the new painting. Video can be added to painting to make a new fusion of ideas and sensations. This should be obvious to all artists.
11. ‘In opposition to’ is never a useful way to proceed. Any work produced from this standpoint will only reflect the opposition, and not the totality. Witness your Flesh piece, created as a response to, but not in opposition to, the idea that we are defined only by our flesh. Flesh still figured strongly in the work.
12. The word spiritual as used by the visionary and remodernist artists, is heavy, and often functions as a schematic unknown. Everyone thinks they know what spirit is, but no one can say. Be wary of it, it can signify laziness, both of intellect and (ah ha ha) spirit. Remain open to the presence and experience of it nonetheless, just do not speak of it much in your texts.
13. Be careful of commerce, and of being revolutionary. Revolutionary art and commercial art have in common that the former becomes the latter, and both often end up on the dustbin of history. Revolutions always come around again.
14. Transcendental not incidental…
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