I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
What's good about many people liking the work is that when I want to collaborate or am interested in the synergy of artists working together, nobody ever says no to me when I ask to work with them.
While working for Diplomat Records, I helped several artists with their online branding and social media. Once I left the label, I worked directly with artists and noticed many artists were overlooked and underrated if they weren't in 'XXL' or 'The Source.'
Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.
You could make the most beautiful film, and that weekend it's raining too hard on the East Coast, and no one goes out. Artists should have a chance to do it again. That's the challenge: Women artists don't get a second chance. People-of-color artists don't get a second chance. You're put in director's jail, and that's a wrap.
People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.
The reason artists show so little interest
In public freedom is because the freedom
They've come to feel the need of is a kind
No one can give them they can scarce attain
The freedom of their own material.
The most effective tool I have to work with artists I admire is to point to other artists that I admire and show that I've worked with them many, many times. It's not because I have option deals; it's because they want to keep working with us.
I think the entrepreneurial activities that make art visible and attractive are what lure people into the amusement park that SoHo has become or that Bushwick or Williamsburg has become. It's not that outsiders come to an area because they hear artists are living there. A lot of people came who were not that interested in living with artists, but they were interested in living like artists and socializing the way that they thought artists socialized.
I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.
I like to be challenged with language, so I start to do texts for my blogs that people can download, can spread. There is no commercial interest behind it. It's only for fun, like doing something that you really enjoy to do. I have texts that I write specifically for the internet and I put them there. I am interested in how readers also respond to the texts that I write to them.
I'm an artist. Artists don't need permission to work. Regardless of whether I'm acting or not, I write. I write when I'm tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.
Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic
Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.
I believe artists should be able to step into other people's situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don't have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies?
I don't digitally manipulate my images, because I am interested in the spontaneous act of creating images without forethought. I know many artists start with an idea in mind, and then they put it on paper. I don't work that way.
I don't know any artists or painters, like, "Oh that painting group." I want to write down this idea of a group of artists who treat it like a band. Like, "Who made the painting?" "All four of us did."