Gregarious Expressions

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.

Art is not a commodity to be capitalized, as DWYL might suggest, but a life that has to be lived.

via Should You Really Make Your Passion Your Job? – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society.

I can see both sides of this debate. Artists should be acknowledged as professionals with a valuable talent and compensated for their contribution to society just like anyone else. Because art is valuable to society.

However, I don’t personally feel that my “success” as a playwright, for example, should be determined by much money I’ve made because that’s not what motivates my work. I get it – there’s not a big market for new original scripts. But I am going to continue to construct plays because that is who I am. I am a person who processes my life’s experience in the form of theatre. The fact that I’ve chosen a life in Scranton may ultimately make my writing more unique, more universal, or at least less compromised. Don’t I want to share it with as many people as possible? Well yeah, but it’s not all about numbers. I don’t need a stamp of approval from someone with an opinion who other people have decided must be important.

Had it not been for my children, I probably would have focused my career more sharply on making plays. But fortunately I was given the opportunity to raise children and resort to a more reliable income in order to support them. This has given me a broader experience of life and its diverse struggles and complications than had I been able to isolate myself in the academic and artistic hierarchies that support playwriting as a profession. (Of course most of those writers are working in film and television to support their theatre habits, so perhaps there is no purity.)

What I do want is to keep getting better. To not give up no matter how impossible it seems to get my work staged the way I see it in my mind. I want to keep writing until I’m so old and impaired someone has to help me. And I want to keep believing that even if my contribution matters or makes a difference to only one person that it will have played its part and been worth it.

-ag

Good article by Terry Teachout, of the WSJ.

Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isnt a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special. So lets revel in that specialness—and sell it.

via How Theaters Can Combat the Stay-at-Home Mindset – WSJ.com.

When you look at a flower or at a face, a certain energy is being thrown ? your look is energy. And you are not aware that when you look, you are investing some energy, you are throwing some energy. A certain quantity of your energy, of your life energy, is being thrown. That’s why you feel exhausted after looking in the street the whole day: people passing, advertisements, the crowd, the shops. Looking at everything you feel exhausted and then you want to close your eyes to relax. What has happened? Why are you feeling so exhausted? You have been throwing energy.

via OSHO Times – Meditation of the Week: Developing Attention – Try to Look.

To be an active artist, to showcase adventurous artists, and to celebrate the power of critical mass through cross-cultural, genre, and generational exchange has forged a path for me to understand what it means to cultivate a life in art instead of a decidedly singular career trajectory.

via On Becoming a Playwright-Producer | HowlRound.

“When you exceed the standard parameters of storytelling, you get this opportunity to reflect on something that is larger than the art itself, which I think is always something that the art is reaching for,” Mike Daisey says.

via In Small Spaces, Theatermakers Are Telling Big Stories : NPR.

Every single show will be podcast, free and without restriction. Each night’s show will be up by noon the following day. That means this show isn’t just for people in New York City—it’s free for people everywhere, forever.

via Mike Daisey: A Q&A about our epic 29-night monologue ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON.

Love this essay. This is why I’d rather insist on taking chances, on always working to instigate the new unknown let’s just try it and see what happens, than fall back on what I already suspect will succeed because there is “no room to fail,” as they say.

Restless dissatisfaction with self and its accompanying anguish make great things happen. So if I am thinking I can handle a theatrical challenge I lose interest. I am driven to do things I do not know how to do and I strive to create situations precisely where I do not know what’s happening or going to happen.

via Against Mastery — TCG Circle.