Previous: Part 3: What Makes Something Art? Why Simplicity Is Hard We tend to think complexity requires more skill than simplicity. More things must mean more work. More detail must mean more expertise. A complicated image must have required more from the artist than a simple one. I’m not convinced....
Featured Works
ORALE: The Myth of Natural Talent — The Work Behind the Work
Previous: Part 3: What Makes Something Art? The Work Behind the Work One of the strange things about professional creative work is that people usually pay for the finished result. They don’t pay for the decades it took to become capable of producing it, and that’s completely understandable. A client...
ELLBJ: Beyond Representation
Previous: Part 3: What Makes Something Art? Beyond Representation When I was young, I assumed that art was supposed to depict something such as a person, a place, an object, or a scene. That isn’t surprising. Most of us are introduced to art through representation. We learn to draw what...
TOMCT: My Kid Could Do That
Previous: Part 1: What Do You See? What Makes Something Art? If you’ve spent any time around contemporary art within the past 100 years, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “My kid could do that.” It is usually delivered with some combination of disbelief, amusement, and irritation. I’ve heard variations of...
MMARS: The Myth of Natural Talent — The Gifted Artist
Previous: Part 3: What Makes Something Art? The Myth of Natural Talent People love stories about natural talent – the child who could draw before anyone taught them, the musician who could play by ear, the athlete who seemed to move differently from everyone else, the artist who supposedly picked...
CEXES: Learning to See
Previous: Part 1: What Do You See? Learning To See In the first part of this series, I wrote about the difference between looking and seeing. We all look at the world, but experience changes what we actually notice. The longer I thought about that idea, the more I realized...