Topic-Based Discussions
Discovery
Take sometime to discuss "Discovery."
Here are some great quotes on the subject from Steve Turner's book, Imagine.
From Arthur Miller:
"For myself, it has never been possible to generate the energy to write and complete a play if I know in advance everything it signifies and all it will contain. The very impulse to write, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning, and that meaning must be discovered in the process of writing or the work lies dead as it is finished. To speak, therefore, of a play as though it were the objective work of a propagandist is almost a biological kind of nonsense, provided, of course, that it is a play, which is to say a work of art."
Another interesting position comes from poet Don Paterson on discovery:
"I don't think poets get ideas for poems, they get words; that's their gift, and they forget at their peril. What usually happens (to me) is that I get this phrase in my head that I can't leave alone; sometimes it's original, sometimes a cliche or some bit of received language I've discovered something new in; it constantly surprises me when I think about it and that's completely essential—if it doesn't surprise me, I can't expect it to surprise the reader, which is the whole point of the exercise."
1. Does discovery happen before you create art, in the midst of creating, or both?
2. Where do you find most of your discoveries come from? Yourself, others, nature, other artistic mediums, ect?
3. What recent discoveries have you made?
Facing Rejection
Discuss the oft occuring act of "Rejection.
In an issue of Artisan, "Uncle Nigel" Goodwin writes:
"No job is for life; flexibility and adaptability are contemporary requirements. Sometimes we should leave and search for an alternative place of belonging and sometimes we should stay and work for change. Part of today’s expression of deep rejection can be found in a real fear of commitment. When everything is uncertain fear ensues, and commitment is hard to maintain."
1. Does rejection motivate you or stifle you?
2. What kind of work have you produced as a result of being rejected?
3. What are the positive and negative effects of rejection in the arts?
4. In the spirit of the Matt Diffee profile, discuss and share your rejection letters, works and memories!
Don't Give Up the Day Job: Making Ends Meet
Take some time to discuss how artists make ends meet. Disucss the the ups & downs of holding down day jobs while we wait for our big break.
From the Guardian: "Don't Give Up the Day Job: How artists make a living"
1. What are the costs & benefits of keeping our day jobs?
2. Can day jobs keep us focused on honing our faculties & true passions?
3. Does your day job inform your art?
Irony of Our Age: On Shows Like PORTLANDIA
Let's talk about satire and the new IFC show "Portlandia". Check out the first page of this article on the show at the New Yorker, and PLEASE PLEASE watch the youtube clip on the scene they describe- it's hilarious! The full episode 1 is also available on Hulu.
"A smugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its provenance? Of course she can, because this is the kind of cool restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where patrons regularly seek elaborate assurances about the virtuousness of their food. “Portlandia,” which débuted last winter, on the Independent Film Channel, is the rare sketch-comedy series that has a sustained object of satire. It’s about life in hipster enclaves, and the self-consciousness that makes hipsters desperately disavow the label."
New Yorker Article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/02/120102fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=1
"But is it Local?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2LBICPEK6w&feature=related
Full episode 1 "Farm"
http://www.hulu.com/watch/206160/portlandia-farm#s-p1-n1-so-i0
1. What do you hate about hipsterdom? What are some of it's virtues? Does hipsterdom even exist?
2. Do you think this kind of cultural satire will foster social improvement, or is it just entertaining?
3. What similarities do you see between the "narcissism of small differences" in urbanity, and within in the arts?
Coloring and Other Activities That Bring You Joy Without Pressure
Take the opportunity to discuss "coloring", or those compulsive activities that bring you joy without pressure. Please check out this short story by Lindsey Crittenden in Image Journal:
"Coloring took me to that place even more than reading did. I loved reading, but it felt so tethered to expectation, my own and others’. To homework, to book reports and essays, to my aunt’s asking me if I’d read Wuthering Heights yet and my father’s rhapsodizing about the last sentence in A Farewell to Arms and my own misbegotten attempts at maturity by reading Fear of Flying. By showing me that I too wanted to write books someday, reading had given me an identity.
Sometimes, though, I needed a break. Sometimes, I just wanted to color. Nothing at stake there, no identity to put on or shrug off. Just following the line of the pen to see where it might go."
1. What are some activities you find yourself doing that help you to relax, but also exercise your creativity?
2. Do you find yourself still enjoying the activities you loved to do as a child? If so, how does it enhance your artistic work?
3.What are your current hobbies?
4. How do you decorate your own creative space?
5. What activity did you enjoy as a child that you haven’t explored as an adult?
6. Take some time this week to explore the child within you by playing again!
Finding the Time
Context:
If you are an artist of any discipline, chances are you’ve got a day job, school, or any number of other responsibilities to tend to. Those responsibilities can easily take priority in your life since they can often feel more “urgent” than your real, creative work. Perhaps you put your creative projects aside until you have some time and a clear mind, but what happens at the end of the day when your energy and creativity have been depleted and you still haven’t engaged in your creative work? What happens when this becomes a habit? As artists, it is important that we each find a way to balance our creative practices with our other responsibilities.
Read this article, The Key to Creating Remarkable Things, for inspiration and tips on improving your creative practice.
Discussion Questions:
- Do you find yourself struggling to put time into your personal, creative work? How much time would you ideally allocate for it? How much time do you spend on it in reality?
- What keeps your from putting more time into your creative practice?
- When do you get your best creative work done? How might you re-arrange your responsibilities in order to use that time better?
- What are your biggest distractions? How might you eliminate them or keep them from stealing your attention?
- What goals could you set to help you keep on track?
Does It Matter?
“It is the artist that can best speak of a nation's desires and hopes and dreams. It is the artist who can move mountains with words and song and sweat and blood and dance and inflict pain on tyrants with knowledge, truth, and wisdom. It is the artist.”
-Kevin Spacey, Nancy Hanks Lecture 2011
Context:
When budget cuts are issued, it seems that the arts are usually the first to go. Many
understand the arts as an expendable frivolity that has little actual consequence.
Funds are dwindling nationally for arts programs, including ones that help our
youth discover their voices in a number of ways. Increasingly, the arts are available
only to the privileged few. In the face of economic downturn and critically
underfunded arts programs, we must demonstrate the power and importance of the
arts in answer to the question, “Does it matter?”
Video:
Watch these clips from Kevin Spacey’s inspiring speech at the Arts Advocacy Day
2011 at the Kennedy Center.
(Click here to watch the full version.)
Discuss:
- In your experiences with the arts, can you think of particular instances that have been defining and important to your personal growth?
- What are some examples of the arts positively effecting society?
- How is exposure to the arts during youth an important experience?
- What would happen to a society without art?
- What can we as individuals do to insure the revitalization of arts and culture within our communities?
Boundaries in Contemporary Art: Street and Graffiti Art
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our
emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which
can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art principles of the past will at best
produce an art that is still-born…..The nightmare of materialism, which has
turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game is not yet past; it holds
the awakening soul still in its grip
-Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”
Context:
The nature of our time informs the sort of language and method that is needed
to communicate ideas. Every age is defined by certain questions and problems
that individuals must address. Contemporary art, then, is a method of addressing
questions and problems of our time. So naturally, the face of contemporary art
is constantly changing. Controversy over the validity of new movements in art is
nothing new. What we are facing today, however, is not merely a conflict of
public interest but one of legality too. The street and graffiti art movement has been
growing in popularity and prevalence in the past few decades and has recently
earned the spotlight in a major exhibition at the MoCA Geffen in Los Angeles,
California. Controversy over the exhibition “Art in the Streets” has only heated the
already burning question—Is street art really art?
Video:
Watch this TED talk by Parisian street artist JR to hear his story about how he used
his art to make a difference in communities around the world.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1085
Discuss:
1. How do street and graffiti art challenge traditional notions and accessibility of
high art?
2. What is positive about street and graffiti art? What is negative?
3. Should street and graffiti art be taken seriously within the broader art world?
Why or why not?
4. How do street and graffiti art address questions and problems of our day?
5. What might street and graffiti art reflect about the direction of art?
Nostalgia
Context
From the Art 21 blog:
"In the preface to his 1991 New York chronicle, Low Life, Luc Sante
impeccably articulates this delightfully torturous paradigm. His
analysis maintains an uncanny resonance to the generation currently
perpetuating and profiting from the time he published:
The common word for this kind of distortion is “nostalgia.” This
word can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for
the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for
order, constancy, safety, and community—qualities that were last
enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the
whole of the time before one’s birth. Recently it has become a
category of trade, under which are marketed the knickknacks and
ephemera of past decades; in this function it encompasses
connoisseurship, fetishism, fashion cycles, and social history, and
makes them all equally base coin."
Discussion Questions:
1. What are some examples of art that relies heavily on nostalgia?
2. Why do you think that nostalgia has evolved to receive its own category within the arts?
3. How does nostalgia within art reflect the spirit of contemporary culture?
4. What are some benefits of nostalgic art?
5. What are some dangers of nostalgic art?
(Thank you to Morgan Riles of IAMNYC for this topic suggestion!)
Why Criticism Matters
T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Function of Criticism" (1923):
The most important qualification which I have been able to find, which accounts for the peculiar importance of the criticism of practitioners, is that a critic must have a very highly developed sense of fact. This is by no means a trifling or frequent gift. And it is not one which easily wins popular commendations. The sense of fact is very slow to develop, and its complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilization.
The Editors of the New York Times Sunday Book Review introduced a book on criticism by writing:
We live in the age of opinion — offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones. Much of it goes by the name of criticism, and in the most superficial sense this is accurate. We do not lack for contentious assertion — of “love it” or “hate it,” of “wet kisses” and “takedowns,” of flattery versus snark, and assorted other verbal equivalents of the thumb held up or pointed down. This “conversation” is often lively. Sometimes it is fun. Occasionally it is informed by genuine understanding as opposed to ideological presumption.
But where does it leave the serious critic, one not interested, say, in tabulating the number of “Brooklyn novelists” who receive attention each year in publications like this one (data possibly more useful to real estate agents and sociologists than to readers)? Where does it leave the critic interested in larger implications — aesthetic, cultural, moral?
We share these Editors curiosity when it comes to criticism. Every serious artist or student of art will come face to face with criticism, arguably an art form itself. There are many schools of thought when it comes to criticism, but at the very basic level, we want to address ruminate on the question, "What is the value of criticism?"
Please read a few quotations from some of the "masters of the form" and come ready to discuss!
Discussion Questions:
- What has been your experience with criticism? Have you ever written a review about a movie, book, art show, etc? Have you had a 'critic' write about your art?
- How has it been helpful? How has it hurt?
- What are some rules of thumb for giving and/or receiving criticism?
- Who is qualified to be taken seriously as a critic?
- What is the role of academia when it comes to criticism?
Topic-Based Discussions
Topic-based discussions are a great way for artists and creative catalysts from many disciplines to sharpen and learn from one another. Here are some topics we have found to be particularly conducive for discussion.