I decided to buy two books today.

Note: 

I am having an image uploading problem on this blog.

I will at least make the fonts interesting. No images - (that sucks for an artist blogger) until I figure something out. Sorry, readers. By the way, thank you for reading my posts! This blog has been getting about 30 hits per day. THAT's really encouraging for me.

So 10.12.10 -

I started working as a part-time data poster. I'm getting a hang of things and excited to have some regular income. Just finished some crazy art tutoring sessions after work with high-energy Korean-American elementary school boys and I have yellow paint all over my arms. I spent about an hour trying to figure out this image uploading problem (grr...), and I am tired.


Anyway,

I decided to buy two books today.

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hyde-trickster.html
I was introduced of this text by Mitchell Squire. I loved a portion of it so much that I am going to read the book now. I'll let you know how it goes...!


Letters to Young Artist 
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/artnews/135/letters_to_a_young_artist
This small book includes inspiring letters from 23 established artists to a young artist. Artists who wrote the letters include the Guerrilla Girls, Yoko Ono, Lawrence Weiner and Joan Jonas. I read this book during my graduate school (and lost it) and found it wonderful, especially on my small breaks.

Artist Xu Bing talks about a place where you live as an artist... and also juggling hours between working (as a part-timer or something) and 'making art.' Here is an excerpt of the letter.

My viewpoint is that wherever you live, you will face that place’s problems. If you have problems then you have art. Your plight and your problems are actually the source of your artistic creation. The majority of young artists who come to New York to develop their careers are eager to enter the mainstream. But a majority of people like you have to spend time working other jobs to support their costs of living here. It may seem like you are wasting time that could be used for creating art, but you needn’t actually worry about this too much. On the one hand, as long as you are a true artist every field that you are engaged in outside of art circles—living and working—will produce treasure, which sooner or later will be used in the creation of your art. On the other hand, for today’s artists it is not important to plunge headlong into this mainstream system. Instead they find a suitable position and relationship to it. But you should know that you must bring something new to this system, which is not already there, for the system to have a reason to accept you. And, it should be something that cannot be found in the system itself. Only if this thing is from some other realm or from the boundary between two regions, will it be possible for you to succeed. Today’s art has become, on the surface, rich and varied, but in terms of methodology more and more narrow. Too many artists know how to make “standard” contemporary art. The system really doesn’t need anymore of this kind of artist.

Just work, and don’t worry whether your talent will be discovered. In fact, with the speed and ease of communication today, tragedies like those of Van Gogh’s time basically do not exist. Museums and curators are the same as artists: they are anxious that no interesting work will come out. So long as you can bring forth something good, museum curators will come to snatch it away for exhibition.



I Wish You Success,



Xu Bing

. . .

I think I can go to sleep well tonight.