Make Your Art No Matter What (Beth Pickens) – some book notes

Make Your Art No Matter What - Beth Pickens book cover

Quick notes from Beth Pickens’ practical guide for artists struggling to balance creative work with making a living: Make Your Art No Matter What.

What Artists Need

Artists need

  • To make art
  • To have a community of likeminded artists caring for each other
  • To consume art and information in any form

Time Management for Artists

Time is always a scarce resource. This is at least as true for artists who need to manage their time carefully. Tool: keep a time diary.

How to make time for the right things:

  • Have a sabbat: do nothing productive, including not making art, 1 day a week. Slowing down will reorganize your thinking and priorities.
  • Have a personal maintenance day once a month. During this day, create a list of goals for everything: what to try, where to be, with whom, what is important, etc.
  • Warm-up exercises: a ritual start to get your mind into a productive state
  • Ask help. If someone can help free up hours of your day.

Making a Living as an Artist

Making 100% of your income from your art will not make you happier.

Create an inventory of your skills, both technical and general. This will help you understand the jobs you are qualified for.

Do not let your employer dominate your life. Employment is a contract. That is all.

Investigate how your peeroes (peer heroes) are making money.

Shopping In Jail by Douglas Coupland: Notes on Surrealism, Technology, and Modern Art

Shopping In Jail

My notes from reading Shopping In Jail by Douglas Coupland:

About surrealism, the subconscious, Internet.

Surrealism today: a randomizer, throwing images and video clips at you. Like taking a snip out of time and putting these in sequence.

On Ed Ruscha. And about the insignificance of (most) of our actions and of (most) art.

About Craft and novelty. Novelty that reflects the prominent yet less powerful forces of a culture is interesting. The crafted object may be the new modern art, in a world of digital overwhelm.

A piece on Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men. The piece is difficult to follow, I have not read that book. It seems a literary manifestation like Harari’s Homo Deus:

Raj is whatever and whoever it is we all seem to have become: a race of time-traveling time killers Googling and Wikiing until our machines transform into something smarter than ourselves, we humans left only to hope the machines may save us in the process.

A piece about Coupland’s visit to China for the book Kitten Clone. About how China is fully embracing new technology and the western world is hesitating complacently (if complacently is a word).

I find it difficult to accept that the new iPhone 12 or foldable Samsung is necessarily a significant technological development I cannot ignore. In my opinion we are too heads-down in today to be able to make sound judgements on the historical relevance of specific, or even more general technological developments.

I understand very well why it’s located in Shanghai, but not why there isn’t also one located in Michigan, where 10 million primates needing 2,500 calories a day are sitting on top of a cold rock in the middle of the North American continent, and they’ve got nothing to do all day except go online and watch porn, TED videos, and bit-torrented movies, …

A piece about Marshall McLuhan, again difficult because I have not read McLuhans work yet. I want though. His work sounds very intriguing.
McLuhan is a futurist. Coupland sees how with all that data that “the internet” knows about us, a cloud gänger is thinkable, but he misses sentience.
The same word that Kevin Kelly uses as one of the characteristics of the Technium, the “living” body of evolving technologies.
Sentience of the Technium is not yet to be born. It is there already, says Kelly.