Creative economy podcast
A lot of this tends toward the usual depressing stuff about the inability of the arts in our day to feed and clothe 99% of its practitioners. But it does sum up a lot of issues. I don't know.... Being a medieval (male) artisan with a lot of family luck in the realm of health and longevity seems more and more attractive.
William Deresiewicz talks about art in our day: the transformation of makers of art from artisans to artist to professional to entrepreneur; the creative economy; online lives and art; digitization; everybody wanting to be an artist; multi-platform creators; craft and creators; the new mode of "creativity."
Seizing ephemera
Jacoba Urist, How Do You Conserve Art Made of Bologna, or Bubble Gum, or Soap?As contemporary artists get more ambitious with their materials, conservators have to find creative ways to preserve the works.
Can we preserve a mayfly as easily as we can a statue carved from basalt? Is the word bologna still applicable to nonsense? Has this bologna risen to the level of art? Should artists who use disposable materials be endlessly curated at high cost? Purchased at high cost? If a work has to be remade every few years, is it not reproduction rather than original work? What happens when the artist dies and somebody else does the reproduction in order to retain the museum or collector's investment? Or are the artist's assistants already doing the work? (If so, can they just continue the artist's work after his/her death, rather as novels are sometimes printed under the name of a dead writer?) Should there be a foundation to do that in perpetuity? Or should the museum get into the manufacturing business? Does common sense suggest that the impossibly ephemeral (bubble gum painting, chocolate sculpture, bologna portraits, styrofoam) should be treated differently from marble, ivory, gold, paint, and "gilded monuments of princes?"
This article fascinates, though it does not address the basic questions that a reasonably intelligent person who had long loved art might have in response to the subject matter.
Psychology of creativity podcast
Exploring the Psychology of Creativity is a conversation between Marc Mayer, Director of the National Gallery of Canada, and Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. March 9, 2017 at the National Gallery of Canada.
Creativity, openness, interest in ideas, art, liberalism and conservatism and temperaments, personality traits and the arts, risk, foolishness, the game of art, tests that select for creativity; employers, systems, and creative people; structures and artists; life as an artist; artistic distribution; winner-takes-all mode in creative domains; aesthetic joy; Jung, archetypes, and artists; deep biological needs to make art; monetizing your art; entrepreneurs; creative children; the genii; art as solving difficult problems; artists as teachers of seeing; the miracle of dreams; mediation between order and chaos; visionaries; art as vanguard; beauty of Europe as infinitely valuable; Canadians, zebras, and standing out.
I love this review of The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd, though it breaks my heart. The reviewer is clear-eyed and sympathetic to Ida Nettleship John and to her mother. The sketch of her is by Augustus John, c. 1900. Poor Ida, an artist barred at every turn but still amusing and touching in her letters. It's too bad she couldn't climb "outside over there" like Sendak's Ida.
The 2017 Frederick Buechner Workshops, FYI
Fuller Seminary has cancelled the September conference, so I won't be doing talks and workshops there in September. It is a shame because the three annual Buechner Workshop weeks at Princeton have done well, and it would be good to have one on the West Coast. But I understand the reasons and wish Fuller well.
One good thing: The day I found out, I also got a request to publish a version of the talk, so that's something salvaged from the work. Should be out within the year.
