1000 reasons not to start making art

Pearls of Wisdom, Take It Or Leave It

In honor of the intern curated emerging artist show at Studio Gallery, Carte Blanche, I have sifted through one very out of date text for some pieces of advice still relevant more than 20 years later. Having dealt with a whole variety of emerging artists, from the the student to the second careerist, and all the problems they bring to the table, I believe the following quotes offer a little guidance to the misguided and direction to the aimless. Take what you like and leave the rest:

James Rosenquist, artist

“The reason I work, the reason I make things, is to illuminate physically some feelings I’ve had. Then they exist outside of myself in some kind of form, so when I am old and gray I’ll be able to look at them and realize that I was alive at a certain period. I really regard it almost like a philatelic thing. When I’m dead, that’s outside the human condition and I don’t care any more about the works.”

Bruce Beasely, sculptor

“The artists I have known who have had rewarding and successful careers are those who have been able to make very clear choices about their priorities and expectations. Once these priorities were selected, they wasted no emotion on the other things they gave up.”

Henry Geldzahler, curator

“How good is my art (not my career), how original, to what extent is it consonant with my intention, what is my ambition for it, and does it have (this must be asked as diligently of abstraction) redeeming social value, does society have any need of it or use for it? These are the questions that hurt.”

Julian Schnabel, artist

“In New York, my plan was to eat pizza and paint pictures.”

Tennyson Schad, gallery owner

“If you want to exhibit and sell your work, you must work at your craft, develop a coherent body of work, and take whatever steps are necessary for that work to be exhibited as often as possible, in museums, universities, cooperative galleries, wherever. This is no substitute for exposure.”

Tibor de Nagy, gallery owner

“Art is a personal expression no matter how much or how little it covers the universe. Whatever it encompasses, it has to be a sincere vision. the technical skill with which it is created is essential for its success. I see, in every artist, a priest of his own religion who wants to deliver is his sermon in order to collect his believers The places where he exposes his beliefs are art institutions and galleries. There are many priests but hardly any saints within a given epoch.”

Ivan Karp, dealer

“When it comes to confronting the owners or directors of galleries for the first time, you must be in possession of the ability to survive repeated, and no always tender, rejection; in other words, you must have emotional resiliency and some perfectly intelligible evidence of what your work is about.”

Jeffrey Deitch, art adviser

“Connoisseurship is developed by seeing as much art as possible, good and bad. In fact, it is only after studying bad works by an artists that one really begins to understand what makes their best works great.”