I spend a significant amount of time at my day job procuring artists statements and trying to make sense of them for laypeople who didn’t go to art school and are perhaps intimidated by art because they think they have to know something they don’t already know in order to have a valid reaction to it.

This is a welcome article and an interesting introduction to a history of the awkward form.

p.s. I’m partial to the artybollocks generator, btw.

-ag

For everyone’s sake—artists and the people and institutions working to support them—it would be better to welcome sense and nonsense, coherence and paradox, philosophy, poetry, and maybe even a little more than a page, all of which might truly represent, rather than reduce, artists and their art.

via n+1: Toward A History (And Future) Of The Artist Statement.