« Art & Fear »

Time for another excerpt bonanza! 

Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland


"It goes without saying that censorship is debilitating to the artist.  It's a little less obvious (at least to artists) that censorship is an entirely natural state of affairs.  Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way; they get eaten."

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"The dilemma here is that for the artist, contact with subject and materials must always remain unguarded.  In making art you court the unknown, and with it the paranoia of those who fear what change it might bring.  But while fear of attracting the wrath of some southern Senator may cast a shadow on your freedom of expression, often the more vexing problem is catching anyone's attention in the first place.  After all, most people see no reason to question their own beliefs, much less solicit yours...

"And why should they? Artistically and otherwise, the world we come into has already been observed and defined by others - thoroughly, redundantly, comprehensively, and usually quite appropriately.  The human race has spent several millennia developing a huge and robust set of observations about the world, in forms as varied as language, art and religion.  Those observations in turn have withstood many - enormously many - tests.  We stand heir to an unstatably large set of meanings...

"Most of what we inherit is so clearly correct it goes unseen.  It fits the world seamlessly.  It is the world.  But despite its richness and variability, the well-defined world we inherit doesn't quite fit each one of us, individually.  Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples' worlds - working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment - and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing, or doesn't quite ring true.  And so you make your place in the world by making part of it - by contributing some new part to the set.  And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created.  Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own.  Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality.  The world is not yet done."

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"And once that kinship between reader and artist has been denied, art itself becomes a strange foreign object - something to be pointed to and poked at from a safe analytical distance.  To the critic, art is a noun.  Clearly something's getting lost in the translation here.  What gets lost, quite specifically, is the very thing artists spend the better part of their lives doing: namely, learning to make work that matters to them.  What artists learn from other artists is not so much history or technique (although we learn tons of that too); what we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage-by-association.  Depth of contact grows as fears are shared - and thereby disarmed - and this comes from embracing art as process, and artists as kindred spirits.  To the artists, art is verb."