Surviving Art A place for anyone curious about the inner workings of the art world. Tue, 16 Jul 2019 21:28:45 +0000 sl-SI hourly 1 Surviving Art 32 32 HOW TO MAKE ART THAT TRANSFORMS PEOPLE Tue, 16 Jul 2019 21:28:45 +0000 Creating art is a two step process; first you obviously have to make it, but then you also have to show it and present it to the public, and hopefully leave an impact on the world (preferably for the better).

But these two steps could not be further apart in both their methodology and all-around nature. The real problem is that making art is a predominantly personal and intimate experience, but showing and presenting it requires an entirely different skillset.

So, in today’s blunder I would like to explore the act of creation and presentation and — with a little help from psychoanalysis, theory of mind and history, all sprinkled with a few down-to-earth examples — show that even though it seems like they are two very disparate things, in order to master either of them, we really “only” need to master one thing: ourselves.

But first; let’s talk about making art.

First we need to figure out the basics and touch upon what we are actually making: Art is an experience, embodied inside an object or subject (like a painting or a performance piece). Its sole purpose is to communicate something, anything, and this purpose always stays the same, whilst the core message and even how it is conveyed changes constantly (think how different styles, motifs, art eras and political ideologies change the purpose of any particular art piece, but the basic idea of any one piece still stays the same — propagation of ideas).

But, at the beginning of our path as artists, art is primarily an exploration of self and not that much about communicating anything. We first have to find our message in order to then concern ourselves with communicating it, and this is where a strong distinction occurs: the distinction between artisan or craftsperson and artist.

The artisan or craftsperson does not posses a message, they do not wish or know how to communicate whatever it is they would like to propagate into the world with their creations. They only create.

Be it out of an urge to make beautiful things, to make functional things or just to play and create for the sake of creation, I’m not really saying that their creations are void of anything — beauty is a message, and so is play — but there exists a strong difference between those that imbue their creations with life, and those that merely bring into life whatever they create as a consequence of creation itself.

To create a table for example, I do not need much in order for me to make my object become a table. I can take a few planks of wood and at least three (but preferably four) sticks and attach them to the planks and call it a day.

Most people would probably agree that I have made a table — albeit a horrible and probably even dangerous one if it were used, but the point is, it could be used as a table and therefore it is one.

So, making a table isn’t that hard and it’s the same with making a chair, a sink and so on. The only difference in making any utilitarian object is the amount of technical expertise one needs to adequately make one (let’s call that part 80% of any particular object).

It is of course harder to make a car or an aeroplane, but as we humans know how to group-up, roll-up our selves, and since Ford demonstrated the incredible efficiency of labour division, even such a feat is doable in the long run and given enough time and resources.

But what about the rest? What about the extra 20% of anything we make, and that basic mathematics so eloquently describes as being quite important for any thing to be a whole “thing”, rather than just a work in progress?

The extra 20% is the semantic value, the meaning of a thing. That part cannot be fully constructed individually or in a group when the object is being built. It can only be made collectively; it needs creators and spectators to come together and ponder over whatever has been made and how it relates to their surroundings and themselves.

And even without the creator present, the object always has a certain semantic value, but it is never present in the object itself. While a bit convoluted, the point is: a chair is not a chair because there exists a heavenly blueprint of “The Chair” somewhere in god’s warehouse of stuff, with IKEA, OBI and MÖMAX fighting epic battles in order to obtain that immaculate rendition for the perfect chair to up their quarterly earnings.

A chair is only a chair because people have collectively decided to call it that and give it its now defined specific purpose — to be sat upon. It is a part of our belief system, and when that system changes, so does the semantic value of the chair (and all other objects, that are part of that system).

If we look at old pottery for example, the first time white long-necked vases were found in Greece, they could’ve been considered to be just that, vases. But as researchers explored them over time (and because they weren’t ignorant people), more detail and context was uncovered pertaining to these peculiar yet ordinary objects. Soon they found that such vases were actually urns, originally filled with the ashes of deceased children and were painted in white, because they symbolised their innocence at death.

And exactly this is the punchline: to symbolise. Only by uncovering context (we could also say the collective amalgamation of beliefs that the researchers uncovered from that time and of those people) could the function of those vases be determined — even if only approximately, because one can never be 100% sure about anything that has happened, especially if it happened in the distant past.

So, in order to find the meaning of anything, we first have to find the context in which it was created. Only by understanding how any object is connected with its surroundings (physical, cultural, etc.) can we really know what that object is.

Without context, you get a Plumbus (the Plumbus is an oddly shaped imaginary object that has no functional application or description of what it is useful for, that appears throughout the popular animated series Rick and Morty on Adult Swim). 

And what is most important for us artists, we can also create context for any one object or subject yourself, either by taking something that has an already established function and purpose in society and reappropriating it for our own means, or creating something new entirely (the best way is usually to combine both worlds, so as to make our art seem novel while still being accessible enough for people to understand the newly created object).

And one of the parts that is incredibly important for us is exactly this process of creating, because it is the process itself that actually stands as a temple to the human condition and capability — without our ability to create, we would have gone extinct as a species a long time ago.

In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes this process as an ever-present, ever-revolving wheel that just keeps turning throughout human existence.

From Genesis, the Bhagavad Gita to the stories of Buddha, Jesus Christ and Muhammad, the Babylonian and Mesopotamian creation myths, Egyptian and Greek mythology; all such stories tell us more or less the same thing: How a person can become the hero of their own world, or to say a bit differently; how a person can acquire the mental and physical tools to bend reality to their will and become a true creator.

Starting ones journey because of the call to action, stepping into the unknown and even dying (albeit a metaphorical, spiritual death, rather than the non-amendable physical variety), finding the demons that dwell in ones mind and soul and slaying them, only to rise again into the world forever changed; such is the evolution of The Hero archetype.

I butcher Campbells book by only giving it this much space in today’s piece, so please read or listen to it if you’re interested, because it is an incredibly amazing piece of literature — almost as incredible as the guy who wrote it (just type his name into YouTube and enjoy the ride).

But my point in mentioning all of this is that the process of creating art is nothing else than the reenactment of what Campbell describes in his book: the Monomyth. In order to create any one art piece that can actually have an impact on people, it has to come from a deep place of understanding and a strong foundation of courage for its creator to even be able to get to that place of knowledge (or enlightenment if you will) in the first place.

It’s not a coincidence so many artists go crazy, commit suicide or just sink into the depths of depression, alcoholism and drug abuse. It’s not that artists are incompetent alcoholics and junkies, it’s the process of making art that takes such a toll on many people.

And the irony of this example is in the fact that most “outsiders” view art as a safe heaven from the “real world”, where adult children can play and not be fretted by words like job security, pension fund and mortgage. But we all know (or at least I hope we do) that there is no such place, and what may be even more important, there is absolutely no such place in art.

Art is a mirror to the world, but not a gross mirror that directly shows a copy of what is in front of it, it’s an exposé, a dissection of reality that takes what it is pointed towards and rips it apart, exposing the bare flesh and inner workings underneath. And it does so without prejudice, without presuppositions and without constraints. Even if we’re not prepared to see what really hides inside ourselves and the objects we are studying, the mirror does not care.

This is the part where one ventures into the abyss, into the dark forrest where the ogre lives, that devours people whole. And this is also the place where many loose a part of themselves — the truth is, we never know how courageous we are, until the time comes when we are tested to our limits.

The point here though is not to stop and never even dare to peek inside the dark places of life. The whole idea is only to be self-conscious and humble enough to know that whatever was, is not all that can be — regardless of how horrible or great we think life is, nothing is static and everything can be changed. If, and this is a big one, if we are willing to pay the price (and as so eloquently described in any old myth or story, the heroes never know the real price, the only thing that keeps them going are their courage and their iron will to go on).

And sure it sounds easy and maybe even stupid, but Basquiat, Van Gogh and Modigliani thought so too. Or maybe they didn’t; regardless, the real point is that we all should respect the process of making art and not take creation lightly, at least if we’d like to one day have a steady and comfortable life, paid for by our art.

Because only the courage to stand and fight in the darkest of forests and in the deepest of nights can conquer the demons that inhabit our hearts and souls. And even if one thinks there are none there, I can assure you we all have them; leeching on our hopes and dreams and silently turning childlike awe and wonder into despair, depression and the monotony of the 9-5. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year. But all of us, if left to our own devices, eventually end up there whether we like it or not.

It’s a choice that is undeniably hard, but righteous and well worth it in the end.

And the best part: the same courage that we can use to create art can then also be used to show art — or better put, is absolutely imperative to show art. Because when we create that piercing mirror and put in into the world, we inevitably become reflected inside of it too. And when that happens, when our exhibition has opened and the spectators come, it’s not only our creation that is judged, but all that we are, even all we wish to become.

And to stand pure judgment, to weather the storm of anonymous critique and the potential of being seen as a failure in the eyes of the people we care about, those we strive to impress, we have to be strong. 

To be frank, we have to stop impressing completely and ourselves become the impression. And the only place to find the strength, courage and the tools to even try to do so, is in the darkness that lives inside of us all.  

CREATING A SYSTEM IN WHICH YOUR ART PRACTICE AND CAREER CAN FLOURISH Part II Tue, 09 Jul 2019 19:00:18 +0000 How can one create their own system? Or better yet: How can we find already created ones, that we can reappropriate and reuse to fit our own needs?

First, we need to look at a basic way of understanding how systems work, because this is the first and biggest problem that all of us face and many of us fail to spot — consequently making us unable to ever really start building our own systems and achieving our own state of control over the forces that are at play in our lives.

There really are only two types of systems that we need to understand: natural and designed systems.

Natural systems are all combinations of relations that exist in nature (are not man-made). Such systems operate by rules that, contrary to common belief, not even Chuck Norris could change. 

They include the way certain materials behave under various conditions; how long a certain type of paint like linen oil and pure pigment for example needs to dry, how vivid the colours are after it has fully dried and how long they stay as vibrant as they were at the beginning — especially under direct sunlight exposure.

These systems cannot be changed; we can’t just decide to create day in the middle of the night and we can’t decide that oil colours will dry as fast as acrylics or that marble will behave the same way as a block of soft cedar wood when chiseled. They operate by rules that we must take for granted and learn fully in order to be able to operate inside of them.

Then you have designed systems: relations of rules that — unlike naturally occurring forces like the speed of oil drying under certain conditions, the mass of stone and the density of wood — can be moulded and changed — albeit slowly, depending on their complexity and how many forces are at play.

For example: adding paint-thinner to our linen oil and pigment mixture would create a designed system that would dry the oil faster as paint-thinner evaporates quicker.

And these are the systems that we need to take great care in studying, because even though it might seem impossible to anyone born after 2000, there actually was a time when flowing water, electricity and even WI-FI weren’t a casual part of society — most systems we know today didn’t even exist in the past.

Almost everything we encounter during our lives when going to and from work or school, buying groceries, exercising in fitness and yoga classes and disposing our trash has once been designed from the ground up and over time developed into what we know today.

And don’t get me wrong, this matters little as some glorified history hour about the importance of sewage systems in ancient Rome, the point to take home is: If it was made — even though some of these systems seem unchangeable — they can actually be changed, altered and even completely abolished.

And that’s what we artists are best at: revolting against the current systems of power (apart from drinking wine and questioning our life choices that is).

It is in a way and unwritten part of our job description — imagine, if one actually existed! — to adapt the current systems of the world to better fit our wishes and views of how society should operate. 

From making healthcare free for all citizens and even non-citizens of any country to creating new technology to sell art online — everything can be achieved with the right amount of energy and drive and enough people to propagate it into the world.

But unlike making one painting (quite an easy and individualistic approach to changing the world), creating the system to make art for the long run and sustain ones career is much more complex — and making changes to the entire system of production (the art world), well, that takes a bit more effort, too.

Because either of the latter aren’t just a onetime operation, we need to create a reliable and long-lasting machine that is able to provide us with everything we need to make our art, show it and sell it; from materials, logistics, marketing, budgets, planning and schedules to storage, sales and everything in between — nothing can be left to chance.

This may be easier for those of you that, like me, have a mild or at least manageable amount of OCD, where such systems are subconsciously enforced by just existing as a person and not having things in their right places makes you giddy and a bit anxious. 

But even those that like things to be messy can and should take their time and energy, and create structures in their lives — in the end, the only real thing that can functionally propagate our careers is a good foundation on which to stand.

And again, we need to look at how systems operate and behave. 

Most of the systems we encounter in life are semi-closed systems, that are kept “behind bars” by their gatekeepers. These are the types of groups, of which only a certain kind of person with a special set of knowledge and skill can become part of.

Doctors need to get their medical licence, lawyers need to pass the bar and so do architects and others, where regulation is enforced to protect the quality of any system’s operation. And it’s similar if one wishes to become a professional artist (that is an artist, whose art can sustain them financially). 

If we want to start our professional careers, we need to get through the gatekeepers of the “classical” art world (usually with the help of a gallery or agent), but we can also decide to forgo this system completely and focus on social media and have a go at the markets directly.

For the sake of this blunder, it actually matters very little which route we decide to take, I only wish to emphasise one crucial point, that pertains to any one of them.

In order to understand a system, one must not only learn its inner-workings attentively, but also take good care in understanding similar and even at first glance unrelated systems. Because in the grander scheme of things, all designed systems are human creations and as such operate under similar rules.

To learn how to paint, we first have to learn how to draw. Then we learn colour theory and how to prepare our colours (unless you buy them), how to prime our canvas and how long to let the paint dry before reapplying the next coat.

But after all these systems have been mastered, we can then decide to learn about other kinds of art and about art history — providing us with more context and a broader understanding of all subsystems of art (graphics, painting, sculpture …). 

Then we can go into pure theory and understand the driving forces behind the human urge to make art, and we can study economics to understand the structures and systems in which art practice operates and how it compares to other types of productions.  

The real point is to never forget to step outside any one of the areas we are studying, especially after a while, and take a look at it from the outside. Because only then do we even have the ability to judge the purpose of any particular system.

In the end, art is always in part about penetrating the norms and reevaluating questions of justice, purpose and equality. And only those that create a strong foundation, a strong system of support (be it monetary, societal or even spiritual), persevere long enough to actually even get to the point of understanding the question, let alone answering any one part of it.

CREATING A SYSTEM IN WHICH YOUR ART PRACTICE AND CAREER CAN FLOURISH Part I Tue, 09 Jul 2019 05:57:50 +0000 A few days ago I had the great pleasure to interview Amy Whitaker, an associate professor at NYU and author of two very interesting books: Museum Legs and Art Thinking. Our conversations and her writing got me thinking about my own exploration of both worlds and the ever-present question of economics in art.

Amy speaks of two inherently different but incredibly interconnected ways of thinking and experiencing the world. The first kind she calls Art Thinking; this is the process of letting go, of giving ones mind the time and space to wander, explore, and get excited about the world. 

The other kind is Design Thinking; the analytical evaluation of things, where not much energy and attention is given to questions like: “What if?” or “Is this possible?”, but ones focus is directed into managerial and operational questions like: “How can I do this?” and “What do I need to complete this job?”.

Both are incredibly important and neither of them should be given priority in our lives — even though artists might tend to overemphasise the former, while letting (or wishing that) others (would) handle the bureaucratic managerial decisions that are just plain boring (like budgets, schedules and logistics). 

The issue really only comes if we decide to prioritise one over the other. And you might have already guessed it: most of us do.

A lot of us dream of making that one project that we have always fantasised about doing, but the scope of the artwork exceeded both our finances and the time we have on hand.

And often limitations like these make us give up on such ventures and many even decide that society just doesn’t value their art enough to see the importance of it and go on to blame others for their lack of funding and other resources.

Or they blame themselves for being either incompetent, lazy or, god forbid, stupid. 

But it’s not that we are any of the above (unless we really are lazy, then there’s no theory that can help — only a nice, well-meant kick in the posterior or ass whooping, as it is called in some places, can really do the job).

The only real reason why such grander plans never come to be is a lack of planing and broader understanding of the system(s) we live in. And all we have to do is open up our minds to the notion that we actually can do anything we want to, if (and this “if” is imperative) we plan the whole thing out accordingly and take our time to first create a system that could fund our project.

Amy uses a neat metaphor for this issue: She speaks about the difference between writing a letter and making the envelope for that letter. The letter in her example is our art, our creative product, that we would like to make. The envelope is the ecosystem, the space in which our art can actually be created, shared and eventually (if we did a good job and have a bit of luck on our side) sold to an excited collector.

The letter part is maybe the easiest to do — but don’t get me wrong, making art is not easy, I just want to emphasise that making art is almost entirely dependant upon us and our will to create. The envelope is the real culprit of a lot of problems in the art world.

Let me explain.

A lot of us artists are either born (this usually depends on the factors of our mother’s environment, when she was carrying us — anxious and stressful environments tend to produce anxious and conservative babies, calm environments produce curious ones), or we are raised to be investigative and constantly hungry for something new. 

A good mix of freedom and control that the parents give to their child, tends to create curious individuals — having overly caring parents usually annihilates curiosity, self-sufficiency and even the belief in oneself in the long run! 

But, be it a novel experience or the search for knowledge and understanding, people who grew up with the right mix of genetic and environmental circumstances, operate quite differently from others, that could be described as being more conservative. Maybe not in their thinking — albeit usually such things are connected — but a strong division can be drawn on the merit of people’s ability to handle and bear the chaos in their lives.

Just think about an anxious and stressed-out pregnant woman; during her pregnancy, about 9 months of biological programming will happen to the foetus and when born, that baby will have been primed for the same kind of hectic, stressful environment as its mother — and the last thing such a being wants (putting this into an evolutionary perspective), is to feel a deep urge to go out and explore the world, that made its mother so anxious. 

The imprint then, burned into the depths of that child’s inner being, creates a simple but profound rule: “Don’t be curious. You’ll get hurt or even die if you do.” 

Such people tend to get anxious in larger crowds, feel a constant stress towards the unknown and crave nothing more than the safe heaven of their home, where they can weather the constant storm of social interaction when their (quite low) limits are reached.

Or, if after a stressful pregnancy, they are then raised in a completely contrasting environment, where they are thought to be curious and such behaviour is strongly rewarded and nurtured (usually by the other parent), they end up confused: 

Wanting to make a stand in the world and assert themselves as a strong and independent individual, but at the same time feeling deep inside of them the heavily contrasted urge to stay down and blend with the crowd. 

Confusion galore, but if you find yourself relating to either (I was an incredibly introverted kid, but that changed because I changed), everything can be altered with deliberate practice and introspection — it just takes time.  

Artists on the other hand like to get lost, sometimes even to the point of complete insanity (probably not the end goal, more a side effect that should be evaded if possible).

While more conservative people thrive in managerial positions, because they love order and are incredibly attuned to preserving it, we love to walk the line between order and pure chaos and not just dip our toes in the dark and fuzzy waters of the unknown, but sometimes even go skinny dipping.

And this process is what art really is all about; a trace or document that is created while the curious by nature go bungee jumping into the darkest abysses of life — all while making selfies to share their experience with their friends.

Just think about all the troubled artists and the stereotype embodied so eloquently but the wordplay of erasing the “T” in “Paint” (spelling the word Pain) that proclaims there is no painting without pain. Bollocks if meant like most people that use this expression mean it, but still true in a way.

All it is, is a trace. A glimpse into the real and profound nature of making art; the interrelation of chaos and order and the people that are either courageous or ignorant enough to venture into the no-mans land that exists between the two.

And yes, the courageous can become the new Picasso or Koons. The ignorant ones, those that are unaware of the real forces at play and what is at stake (their own sanity) on the other hand, they tend to end up the Van Goghs, Modiglianis and Basquiats of the art world.

The real point here is to understand what the process of making art really is, and to not just “go with the flow” of ones curious inner drives, but to take good care in creating the envelope, prior to writing the whole letter.

The envelope is the system, the lifeline that attaches our physical selves to the “real world”; for example being part of an economical system, that can provide us with resources for our work (like paint, clay, camera equipment and the like).

It also connects us to various social systems and gives us the ability to communicate our views, ideas and creations with others (for example marketing, social media and gallery structures provide us with such tools).

But there is also another kind of connection that such systems form: a mental connection to the outside world. Without a strong link to “reality”, we can quickly end up disconnected, even completely dislocated from the rest of the world, and if you have ever been depressed (the real kind of depression, not the vague notion of being “a bit sad”), you know exactly how incredibly horrendous such a state is.

The envelope therefore is imperative. Without it we risk not only failing to create our art, but can even risk putting our physical and mental wellbeing on the line.

WHY PLAYING BY THE RULES IS SOMETIMES IMPERATIVE FOR CREATIVE PROGRESS Mon, 01 Jul 2019 21:09:49 +0000 The world can be a weird, alien and sometimes even completely incomprehensible place for many of us. Most tackle this issue by learning about one part of it, and try to understand it enough so as to be able to operate in that niche competently enough to stay afloat.

These are the people that identify themselves as a certain kind of guy or gal; they might say: “I’m a fisherman.” or “I am a wine aficionado.” or “I’m a father and professional pianist.” The point is, we’re all something, and that something is the small scrap of real-estate, that we have conquered for ourselves, not only to propagate our life, but even define its scope — sometimes even its meaning and purpose.

But there are others, that sometimes decide the world is just too foreign of a place for them to functionally be a part of it; convoluted and distorted politics, fascist social movements and oppression of basic human rights (or at least rights, that are deemed to be basic by current system of beliefs) make our society a shadow that many choose to evade and, like Peter Pan, decide to dislocate themselves from it and move to wonderland — meaning they move off grid, live a hermit’s life and, detached from society, mind their own business.

But I’m not judging; each one of us needs to find their own place in the world, even if that place is in a way outside the “known” world of the 21st century — lacking wi-fi, 7-Elevens, running water and a sewage system.

And there are still other people that feel a connection, or even need to stay part of the system, but at the same time construct their own set of sub-rules, a kind of mini world in itself — the artists, adventurers, dreamers, visionaries and psychonauts — we tend to invent our own worlds, our own games, in order to still retain some form of control in this whirlwind of constant chaotic change and adapt not only to life, but mould life itself to fit our own needs. 

The question I’d like to pose today therefore is: How does making your own rules, and sometimes even completely rejecting the already established ones, that our environment proposes, impact our perspective on life and place in society?

A wonderful quote of which the author eludes me even after 5 min of thorough Google searching goes like this: “Life is a game. You can be a player or a toy.” 

This short two sentences more or less explain the whole idea of playing other people’s games versus making your own and letting others play yours — in the end, it’s all about control.

That’s why many decide to completely forgo society’s rules and customs and go live in a hammock — they retain full control. But that’s the easy way out; even though living in a tree with no running water (I’m exaggerating — off grid living is slowly becoming a luxurious lifestyle to be honest) doesn’t really seem like the easy path, people who do go off grid, consciously (or even subconsciously) decide to never again be burdened by the dominance hierarchies that rule our society and the social or physical (monetary) debt such hierarchies produce in their players.

And the best way to explore these hierarchies is through games:

In the most rudimentary form, games are an enactment of control. Like simple games of chance for example, where control is given up in order for our basic wants of being lead, not having to have everything figured out and leaving decision-making — the core quality that propagated us to the top of the food chain and the most brain intensive workout there is— to be made by “chance”, by a power outside of us, that we allow to take charge in a simulation of our life.

Other games challenge us to take charge of this control; the reason why some people love Monopoly and others hate it to death is because some love the power struggle and the hierarchy of dominance and subsidence that evolves around it. Dominance for them is a place where they feel at home. Others, well, they’d rather play Yahtzee or Uno.

The point is to not judge; we’re all different The real gist of today’s blunder is about why it might sometimes be better to stay inside the hierarchy and rather than invent our own the moment we encounter opposition. It might actually be better to take good care and a decent amount of effort and learn about all the various power plays and their rules, that are enacted around us every single day — especially for those of us that like to break every single one, the second we encounter them.


My reason of talking about this via the medium of games it that they just work so well. We humans like to play pretend, to simulate — in the end, that’s what thinking really is, playing pretend, so that we can simulate reality to either plan a move or just to amuse ourselves with banalities that have no place in “the real world”.

But while “pretending”, we are still enacting the same rules that govern reality — at least up to the point when unicorns and fairies come into play. And these reenactments, in the comfort and safety that such quasi real happenings provide, can quite easily be studied, so as to find the underlying rules and forces out of which they (and reality) are comprised.

Games are a transitory event that adults and children alike use to learn about reality, and more importantly, teach themselves how to behave in relation to it: We play chess to learn about thinking ahead and the causality of such behaviour. We play Telephone to witness first-hand the distortion of communication that naturally occurs in everyday life — albeit, usually we do it just to have a laugh.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the game of Telephone or Chinese whispers as it is called in some places, it’s where players whisper a phrase to their neighbours until the message reaches the last player in line, where it is then uttered to the whole group and compared to the initial phrase — usually completely different from the original.)

And we play Monopoly to learn about capital, and how it can be used to screw over people’s lives and/or build hotels, all while experiencing the fun and incredibly fantastic concepts of money, chance and venture capitalist dogs and sentient thimbles.

But, in order to play any game, we first have to learn its rules. That’s why tarot is so scarcely played and poker so popular — even though one could objectively say that the former is much more interesting as a gambling platform, because of the intricacies of its rules, and the interrelation of chance and skill required to win a game.

Fun fact: Tarot was first introduced in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century (allegedly in Italy, but who could really know?), but because of the sheer complexity of its rules, the game slowly became less about actually playing it, and more about telling interesting stories about the various connections that one could imagine about the cards that were in play.

This was what started the whole idea of predicting the future with tarot cards; royalty and aristocracy would pay tarot tellers to come to their card nights and tell wondrous tales about the cards that each player got dealt and slowly but surely, this story time evolved into a now still quite popular belief that tarot cards can predict the future. In reality, all it is is a reminiscence, a residue of a time, when people just weren’t smart or attentive enough to play the damn game.

On the other side you have games like Dungeons and Dragons, that are so incredibly complex and open in their rules (you do still have to learn them and there are a lot of guidelines to follow, so it isn’t exactly a “wing it” kind of a game to be honest) that preparations can take days, sometimes months of planing for each session and the duration of a session can last from a few hours to several days, sometimes much more!

But what happens when we play a game without knowing the rules or even if we just decide to forgo learning them in the first place?

Imagine playing chess without knowing how the piece moved; it might be fun for you — especially if you like to screw with people — but you opponent would most likely lose all enjoyment in the game, even become irritated by it. 

The problem of such a free approach to any game is that, unless your opponents or the other team players (if such a game is played in a group) enjoy chaos and banal freedom, anyone apart from you — and even you at the end — will not enjoy the game.

Football isn’t basketball, and you just can’t touch the ball with your hands (the European variety that is), even though no natural rule states: “Thou shalt not touch rolling balls with thy bare hands, unless you are guarding a large box, in order to prevent the ball from entering said box and bringing shame to your people.”

Rules are there for a reason, even if the irony of that reason is that only by imposing a strict — but fair — set of rules, can playtime of any sort become enjoyable.

So, this brings us back to our core question: How does making your own rules, and sometimes even completely rejecting the already established ones our environment enforces upon us, impact our perspective on life and place in society?

Because all human society is a collection of various games — all with their own sets of rules and structures, that in order to join and become part of any group, need to be learned and embodied. If they are not, we are forbidden to play with the other players, or we’re just ignored and rejected from becoming part of their playtime in a passive way.

But we artists like to break these rules, we also like to learn a bunch of unrelated and, at first glance unconnected rule structures, because curiosity and the urge to understand ourselves and the life around us, compel us to.

And the problem isn’t so much in learning them, albeit it could really be proposed that in order to foster the urge to break any particular rule, one must first possess a broader understanding of the context in which that rule was created. Because, only then can we find discrepancies or even injustice in its structure that inevitably lead us to wishing to break them, and in the end doing so, because it’s in our nature to spot inequality a mile away.

Or you’re just a revolting anarchist, content with society crumbling down into the abyss that it came from, by the power of the same inconsequential cosmic fart that created it and its torments in the first place. Then, one could argue, you really don’t need any context or reason — nihilism is great like that.

So, the only way to be a functional member of society, is that we have to learn the rules that govern it. And the same goes for any one part of society; one has to first learn anatomy to be able to adequately draw the human figure — and no, cartoon anatomy doesn’t count, I’m talking about real muscles and real people, not exaggerated eyes and turnip shaped heads.

Rules, regardless of what system they are part of, are there for a reason. And as someone that enjoys little else more than “doing his own thing” I have learned to first observe, and do so intensively, attentively and especially for a long enough to be able to really discern not only the descriptions of rules that various systems are built upon, but their core reasons for existing.

It’s like getting a new job in a foreign company where you know no-one and are just floating in a sea of unintelligible hierarchies and relations between people. That’s your state the first day, and maybe the first week, but either through some kind college that tells you a bit about who is who and what their relationships are or (better) through your own observation, you can overtime begin to discern these structures and after learning about them, even become part of them.

But, were you to be completely ignorant about them, your chances of ever having a good time at work would diminish substantially. Same as the example of the chess player that doesn’t know how the various pieces of the game move, you would irritate people, create banal and most likely unintended conflicts between you and them only on the grounds of not knowing the rules.

But such hierarchies don’t only exist in job environments and games. They are present in our creative work too, albeit in a different packaging. When we paint, sculpt or take pictures, we are encountering hierarchical structures of life itself. 

Let me explain this convolution, by saying: It’s never going to feel like you know what you’re doing (if you’re doing the right thing, that is), but that’s not the point.

Regardless of how proficient a writer, painter, or sculptor becomes, no matter how much knowledge they gather up over the years, it will probably never really feel enough. The feeling of having to, but not exactly knowing how to be just a bit better, will stay and gnaw on the soul forever. 

And that’s fine.

Unlike monotonous and routine work like cleaning up or brushing ones teeth, creation always carries within itself a certain novelty. When we create — even if we’re doing the same thing over and over again — we always encounter something new. We encounter the chaos that lurks behind every single object, subject and phenomenon in the world. And especially those, that live inside of us and guide our behaviour.

But, be it a new challenge, a new and better way of blending colours or expressing ourselves with our words, or just a new move we can incorporate into our dance routine — creating means venturing into the unknown. We never really know exactly how we’re going to do it and how whatever we end up doing, will make us feel — sometimes even change our perspective on the world completely.

But to truly have a sustainable career in the arts (and a prosperous and adventurous life), we have to embrace this constant state of flux and push against the unknown, regardless of how we might feel about ourselves, our living arrangements, social and financial status or the weather.

Because when we do this everyday — when we build a routine set of self-imposed rules, that we decide will govern our behaviour — we grow not only our skill and our craft, but we grow as people. Everyday we stand the storm of self-critique and the feeling of resistance towards creation diminishes, bit by bit it becomes easier and easier to overcome.

This is the reason many of us create; even if we don’t think about why we do what we do, we feel this internal urge to have a go at it. And while most might just call this a need to create, it is about so much more than just the act of expressing oneself.

To create is to have control. The control over existence itself — albeit minuscule at first glance. To be able to mould cloth and pigment into a depiction of beauty is a miracle we all can bring into existence. 

And with it, we bring a bit of peace and comfort — the feeling that we really know what we are doing and that it is our purpose to do so — even if in the grander scheme of things nothing really matters and all we have ever known and felt may just be a speck of dust on the canvas of the ineffable, we create purpose everyday.

At the same time, it might never feel like you really know exactly what you’re doing — regardless of how many rules and structures are created and followed, all of us will still end up lost along the way. 

And that’s fine. 

Because the answer can’t be found in any single day, any single creation or any single brush stroke or chisel for that matter. It lays in the totality of everything we do and why we do it. 

And at the core, every art piece does one job, and it does it with incredible proficiency: painting by painting, sculpture by sculpture, a bit of darkness is lifted from the world so that yet another beam of light can shine onto us all.


(Friedrich Nietzsche)

And to arrive at the why, we first need to build up a strong foundation of rules, that we have gathered from the various social games that are played all around us. For only those of us that build our foundation on a functional set of rules, are able to shape their Why into an intelligible-enough and substantial form, so that it can — as Nietzsche states — help us bear any how, that is any potential chaos that will inevitably arrive at our doorstep and knock on our “fixed conception of the world”.

It’s not a fixed world we are living in, but even though nothing is as it was yesterday, everything changes in subtle and mostly unforeseen ways, rules are there to guide us into a better future. All we have to do is to listen, look closely enough and embrace those that fit our view of the world. 

HOW TO BUILD A GOOD FOUNDATION FOR YOUR CREATIVITY Thu, 27 Jun 2019 05:49:36 +0000 When we think about creativity and inspiration, we might picture an image of a spirit, a muse, that comes forth from the heavens and touches us in funny places at the most random of times imaginable.

But these moments aren’t random, and there really is no extraterrestrial or divine power fondling our brains. It’s all an illusion, a misunderstanding of causality and how our perception and thinking work.

While the idea of inspiration coming from outside of us isn’t that far from the truth — the building blocks of any idea are build, similarly to dreams, from our encounters with reality — it’s not the outside that needs to come into alignment for us to get a “great” idea. 

It’s our insides.

Before writing this blog, I struggled with sitting down and doing my thing for about 4 hours; mindlessly scrolling Facebook, checking my podcast stats and Mailchimp settings and playing around with the WordPress installation of my website, all just trying to find something, anything that would make me sit down and actually get to work.

Well, it didn’t work — even though you’re reading my blog as always — it didn’t happen because I magically got inspiration from my YouTube analytics page. It happened because I went for a run.

Let me explain.

The creative “spirit” or, because I don’t believe in metaphysical phenomena, let’s call it creative thought, is a very primitive beast. Not as primitive as our most basic drives to eat, sleep and copulate, but it’s not the super-computer everybody thinks it is.

It’s a state. 

And like with all human states, it needs to be cultivated, nourished and forced if necessary — because to be honest, 99% of us don’t need to be creative; we are well fed, we have clothes and a home and wi-fi and nice sneakers. 

Many of us get through life without ever encountering real danger or opposition. And no, having a mean boss doesn’t count. Having a bad day at school doesn’t even come close and neither does your car breaking down, your favourite pair of pants ripping or your beloved Netflix show being cancelled.

Creativity is an evolutionary trait that came to be because we humans are a weak species when it comes to physical strength, speed and most other types of bodily capabilities that various other animal species possess to stay alive in this jungle that we call life. 

So evolution, chance and a myriad of other forces produced in us a strong capacity to simulate — to think ahead and imagine what could be.

Alfred North Whitehead famously said: “the purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying” and he was right. In the olden times this was our only defence against going extinct; famine was prevented because people that used to live in my country decided to toil away on fields the whole summer, so that they could survive the harsh winters with the produce they cultivated.

Opposition back in the day was real and the threats were much harsher and more unforgiving that they are now — thanks to advances in politics, technology and medicine, not to say in our basic understanding of what humanity is all about.

Even just 70 years ago, my grandfather knew a completely different opposition from the ones we know today (at least in Europe and other developed countries). 

He and a bunch of other men, women and even children stood half naked and sometimes barefoot in the coldest months of winter, clothed in semi-functional rags and maybe a pair of boots that were almost definitely too big or god forbid too small — much more likely, which usually meant they cut off the boots’ toes, effectively making them about as winter proof as a silk handkerchief — and waited to repel a foreign force that was armed with automatic machine guns, tanks and the belief that all slavs are wild beasts that need to be eradicated from the face of the earth so as to give the “true, rightful breed of humanity” the ability to rule the earth.

Many of them died. There was no “equality”, no ethics and no morality. No social services or HR person to complain to — the only human resources that were measured were the amounts of people that were sent into oblivion, because a few people decided that having a certain face shape and eye colour wasn’t exactly to god’s standard.

Not to get off track here, I myself am only an observer, so who am I to even judge or tell such tales, but I grew up with them and embodied them as a child. I only wish to propose them as a broad context for what I’d like to talk about today — discipline and adversity.

Not exactly the kind that the army enforces upon its members, but not exactly unalike either. Creative discipline is something a lot of us lack and more of us forget — even if just from time to time.

Nobody is born with it, nobody even remotely thinks they need it — especially us creative types, that want to be “free” and roam the pastures of life, exploring and playing around in our self-constructed heavens of the sublime.

Discipline is earned by hard work and lost by nothing more than a brief hiatus. But the biggest problem with creative discipline is, that unlike physical discipline — where the goal is to induce a moderate amount of pain and suffering to the practitioner, so that they may cultivate a masochistic part inside of them over the long run and enjoy the actively and predominantly self-induced pain and even find solace in it — creative discipline is harder to manifest. And even more so over the long run.

Creativity is play, not work. And as such, play must be free, undisturbed by any outside forces that might distort or even break the illusion that play provides for those that are partaking in it.

Think of a simple game like playing family (where children enact the power dynamics that unfold inside a family); one child will play the baby, one the mother and the other will play the father and/or mother and all the combinations in between — this is an open minded blog, so I have no idea what the “contemporary” family unit is comprised of in leftist-heavy places, but whatever it is, let’s also include that and any other ones into our example to not delve too deep into politics, as nobody cares about them, or closer to the truth, I don’t care about them; live and let live.

If someone disturbed this charade of social roles that is taking place; if the child playing the daddy decides he wants to be mommy now, they will break the spell of the game and playtime has ceased to be — even is just for a moment.

It’s the same if two teams play football and each team has one player that is absolutely horrendous at the sport — if they wish to make the game enjoyable for all the other players, they need to get rid of the bad ones, so that the flow of the game isn’t disturbed by anyone being out of line. 

And there are many other ways of disturbing games — game theory being a wonderful field to have a go at for anyone interested — I just want to focus on the fact that one can break the game.

And to get back to discipline; discipline can break the game. Not in the same way as the two prior examples, but in an even more detrimental way. Unlike being bad at a game or one of the players deciding to boycott the game and kill the vibe for the other players, discipline kills the whole essence of a game.

That’s why learning anything new isn’t fun until you can at least do the basics. Nobody likes guitar if all they ever did was practice the G scale for 2 weeks. Nobody will like basketball if all they did was train how to dribble the ball for a month without ever actually playing the game.

Only the people that get to the point of proficiency, where they can at least semi-competently execute rudimentary instances of any game, get to the point of feeling a positive connection with it.

And the real goal is to balance the scale, so as to have enough discipline to never stop growing and always deliver whatever it is you should be delivering — it doesn’t have to be good, it only needs to be regular — and to never stop liking the game and enjoying it whenever possible, so as to not grow too far apart from the actual reason that made you start playing in the first place.

So, a run made me do this blog — and usually when I write my blunders, I do them in one take. One hour, sometimes two and that’s it. The hard part is never making them, but to start making them.

Therefore I started to discipline myself; I wrote daily for almost half a year until recently, when I had too many other responsibilities and work related things on my calendar, where I decided to only make one a week and rather than focusing on quantity, give quality priority.

But the main point for me is to run. Why?

Because I never liked it. To run was to me equal to wasting my life, a metaphor for running away from my responsibilities and issues and it felt not only demeaning, but boring. And it was the boredom that I couldn’t face.

But now I run three times a week, sometimes more and sometimes less, but I try to do about three each week. Because going for a run and consequently doing weight exercises doesn’t only give me a physical boost and a more health body — not saying having four times the stamina as I had a year ago isn’t a big plus — it gives me a strong kick in the ass to do what I otherwise wouldn’t do. 

And it does it in perpetuity. 

I know there are those of you that don’t need such regimes — and kudos to you all — but I do, and I bet there are a lot of us out there that would, for the love of god, rather smoke weed and drink cold ale all day than actually do what we love. 

Not hate, or ought to, but love!

And now to why running works (for me). It might be sleeping for you for all I know, the point is, each of us has to find their own thing and stick to it.

Running for me makes me do something I don’t like (albeit to be fair, I have grown accustomed to doing it now and only partially hate it — I might even someday like it). And doing something I don’t like that much teaches my body not to whine and to act whenever it needs to, not only when it feels like it.

Because there is no real danger to my life (and believe me, our bodies know that running out of Snickers bars or tobacco isn’t the same as being chased by an angry Nazi or wild cat), my body starts to become dull, inattentive and unresponsive to stimuli — especially cognitive, coming from my own mind. 

That’s the adversity that we’ve lost because of the safety we now enjoy in developed countries — and don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly grateful for it, but we have to pay the piper, too.    

And because there is no real outside threat that we feel, our bodies become lazy and stubborn — why move if I can lay in bed all day? Why cook if I can order pizza? Why do anything, really? In the end, isn’t all life purposeless and void of meaning?

That’s when nihilism slowly seeps in and starts to gnaw at the soul. And the problem is, it’s not a fallacy — life is void of meaning in the grander scheme of things, and a dull and fatty body that only cares about instant gratification will always sway the mind to become at least in a way a proponent of nihilism — even for those of us that aren’t as attentive to know what nihilism is will tell you the populist version of it: They don’t give a fuck.

But this force is quite older than nihilism.

In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield describes it as The Resistance, but it had names even before plumbing was invented. The original Hebrew term sâtan is derived from a verb meaning primarily “to obstruct, oppose”. And if used with the definite article (ha-sâtan), it means the heavenly accuser himself — the devil. But you had Apep in Egypt and Erebus in Old Greece too.

The point is, the Obstructor has been around since the dawn of man, whispering and lightly influencing each and every decision our ancestors made. And he is still going strong. 

When you don’t really feel like it and decide — 5 min before getting to work on your new painting — that you’ll rather start tomorrow, he’s there. When you then persuade yourself that starting tomorrow is actually better because of a lack of materials, your schedule, something about your spouse … he’s there too. 

And he is absolutely there when the alarm goes off and you decide to “just close your eyes for a sec” the very next day. He practically invented the snooze button on your phone.

The question therefore is: What can we do when this immortal, supernatural force is exploiting our weaknesses and curating our demise?

It is really, really hard to go at it alone. But there is a trick that simplifies the process immensely. It is in fact so simple, it made the inventor of the cure one of the biggest names in our society and his products have been gathering a cult following for decades.

It’s even universal; works for painters the same as it does for musicians — even actors and actresses can use it. Hell, even bankers, busboys and businessmen can, it just works every single time.

The secret?

Just do it.

FORM AND FUNCTION — THE NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR MEANING AND PURPOSE Mon, 17 Jun 2019 21:11:39 +0000 To be frank, all comments on either the meaning or purpose of anything are irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, because all are but a form of ideology, a kind of software that runs in our minds if you will, and contrary to common belief that humans are nothing more than complex Turing machines, no programs are actually alike.

What I believe my purpose is, could not be further from what you or your friends might think your goals in life should be; while we might all resemble each other in the ways we operate — we may wish to expand, to satiate our insatiable curiosity about life, to play and consume and of course gain as much power as we can (or believe is appropriate to have) — each and everyone of us has a distinct means of operating in the world.

What I’d like to focus on today is the distinction between form and function or between self-actualisation and power appropriation.

But I think a bit of foreword is necessary to explain this possibly convoluted choice of a dichotomy that, like many philosophical ventures into the banalities of over-theorisation — this hopefully not being one — can produce, when “knowledgable and well informed” minds tend to propose the proverbial 2 + 2 = whatever-the-heck-I-want-it-to-be equation in their thinking and at first glance making it work by twisting and oversimplifying semantics.

I hope I won’t succumb to this, but as with all my blunders, all you lovely souls are the judge and you can all decide not to leave any tip for today’s blunder if you so decide. 

(The tip jar by the way is located on the website called Patreon, so if you wish to find it — so as to be able to ignore it — just type in Surviving Art into the search box. Or if you’re feeling generous and like my blunders, well, you can choose to drop a coin and support this channel — it is called Surviving Art, and as Austin Dobson so eloquently puts it: “The bust outlasts the throne, the coin Tiberius.”)

But back to pondering the meaning of life and what not.

Form and function rule the world of the living; the former making up the world and the latter giving purpose to it. And I do not mean this in any mystical or magical or even religious way, because form is merely the substance that we call reality — but function, function is something different entirely.

For someone that has dabbled in philosophy, function can quickly come to mean functionalism or the view that form is irrelevant, what actually matters is what things do, how they behave and how such behaviour can be experienced.

On a side note, functionalism is extremely entertaining as the core of such a view on life and reality as a whole dictates one to believe that a 1 to 1 copy of me — let’s call it a zombie me — that would look like me, behave like me and pretty much do things exactly like me, but would not have any free will or any means of actually expressing himself (or itself, I’m not sure if zombies have genders, because the movies tell us that they reproduce asexually by gnawing), well, that zombie copy of me would by all functionalist terms and conditions be considered the same as me.

Free will and attention thrown out the window, such a creature obviously isn’t even close to what makes a person or even a human, but such is the belief of functionalist philosophers. 

So, this is not a functionalist text, what I wish to talk about is function as projection. When I make anything that I decide to call art — be it a painting, a sculpture or just a random movement, backed up by a bunch of gibberish theoretical text from the golden 60s, the renaissance of performance — whatever I create that I decide to call art, becomes art only if I actually believe it is art.

This is the never-ending question of what art is, that we talked about in the last blunder. The experience of any object or subject as art, makes it so. And now, I think it would be interesting to venture further into the details of how and explore the incredibly interesting question of “Why?”!

But, let’s start with form.

Form is nothing but potentiality — not to confuse speculative realists, material potentiality, that is potentiality to be used or become anything it is capable of becoming via the act of projecting function. 

The true nature of form is absolutely inert, it does what it can; water flows downhill, fire burns, hot air goes up, cold water sinks to the bottom of a glass… Form is reality, moved and transformed by the physical rules that govern our universe.

And again, contrary to common belief, there is nothing even remotely interesting about form — at least not for any reasonable human mind — but to be honest, human minds weren’t created to see form. We mostly see function.

When looking at a stick in a forest, it might not even register — it’s a damn stick and nobody cares, there are thousands of them and when one is taking a hike, there’s really no use in looking at sticks if you have hills and “the sublime nature” to look at. 

But when our walking stick breaks or we sprain our ankle and need something to help us walk back home, suddenly a myriad of interesting and appealing sticks start to appear before us.

When we indeed need anything, we become attune to finding it. That’s the crap that The Secret tried (and sadly succeeded) to sell and while doing so, sparked the entire self-help market for years to come. 

(If you’ve never heard of The Secret, it’s a book about how positive thinking will make you happy, rich and content and how negative thinking by the Jewish community was partially the reason for the holocaust — dear lord the author’s words, not mine, the book is complete rubbish is all I can say.)

But it’s not wishing for something that makes it magically appear — I can dream of sticks night and day, I can make pretty drawings of them and pray to the stick god that he may be so kind as to grant me one someday, but if I live in the centre of a desert and more or less eternity stands between me and the next thing that even vaguely resembles a tree or bush, there will be no stick for me. 


This phenomena of suddenly constantly seeing or encountering a particular object — like when you buy a new car and out of the blue there are hundreds of cars of the same model on the road — is just a natural process of how our attention works.

Imagine the first people that roamed the earth with no clue as to what was edible and what was not; if they had no ability to memorise familiar objects and get adept at finding them again and again, we’d all be extinct due to berry poisoning hundreds of thousands of years ago.

But we didn’t, and all because our minds are incredibly attuned to finding patterns and familiarities in our surroundings. That’s why abstract art, that isn’t that well done is so horrible to look at; the second that blotchy painting kinda resembles a penis or a weird smiling octopus, the magic and intrigue is out the window. All you’re left with is a hidden dick pic or marine life snapshot of questionable quality on your wall and the hope that no-one else ever sees either of them.

Form for us is mostly an amorphous void, an amalgamation of a myriad of unimportant bits and pieces and the only thing that makes it appear on our “radar” and gets it noticed by our mind is if we find it interesting. It could be beautiful, or ugly or just plain sad. Could be a horrendous or grotesque experience — the main point is, that it must be something, because if it’s nothing of interest, it might as well not even exist.

Here learning comes into play; the more we know, the more we understand our surroundings and the environment that we live in, the more we are capable of noticing things. And if the first step is understanding, we need to focus on it primarily, because understanding can only be found in form.

Form therefore is the act of curious exploration and the creation of understanding. 

Sociologists call this the act of transference. Not to be confused with Freud’s idea of transference — the act of projecting feelings about someone else, particularly someone encountered in childhood, onto ones therapist — something Sigmund liked to call “playing daddy”. This is the pure idea of transference, the act of spreading ones boundaries, ones body and being into the world.

To put it simply, when I buy a new watch, it becomes my watch by me paying for it, wearing it, scratching it when having fun with my friends and eventually loosing it, because it sometimes happens and life isn’t about material things anyway so you learn to live with the loss and just become content with using your phone like most other people.

Somewhere in the beginning of my encounter with that watch is when the act of transference happens; when I decide that the watch is suitable to become part of my body — not my physical body, at least not until Phillips or Samsung begin selling implant timepieces — but my perceptual body.

The same body that grows exponentially when I sit in my car, the same one that gets even bigger when I come home to my apartment and that gets tiny when I am stranded on a busy street during rush hour and thousands of strangers are rubbing against me, while I keep constantly checking if I still have my wallet and keys.

Our bodies really don’t end at the skin — one could argue that even the parts that keep us alive don’t just reside inside of us (we have air, water, food and other sources, that we constantly need to replenish in order to stay alive, none of them really only coming from within us, but all incredibly vital for our survival). 

The human body — and the body of every evolved creature, because it’s not just humans that have this ability — has a physical and a perceptual volume; the physical being our meaty vehicle, and the perceptual being whatever we have transferred ourselves upon. 

That’s function. 

And what is function if not the ability to control, to have power over something, to make it yield beneath our bodies and make it a submissive part of ourselves, to be used for whatever we please and discarded whenever we tire of it or it has served its purpose?

A bit dark, I admit, but true. Function is our attention, our perception and ability to remember certain objects in such vivid detail, that we are instantly able to recognise them as our own — even though there are millions of the same kind or type of them on the market all around the world.

Functions give us purpose — they are what Nietzsche called: “The necessary illusion.”, a fake and completely unreal value of reality, not in any way pertaining to it, but vital to our survival as a species.

Had we not evolved this ability, we could not even dare to dream about understanding what other people want or need — in other words, compassion towards others. Because compassion, like all other social skills, is based on one core aspect: Humans have the ability to understand not only their own functions, their own illusions (even though no sane person calls them illusions; we like to use the word beliefs or politics or religion or philosophy…), but the illusions of others — at least to an extent.

This is the true power that we have, the true head start that we have gotten from evolution or god or some high-school alien researchers that did a terrible job tending to their science experiment and dumped it on some rock, far away from their teachers perceptive organs (I have no idea what aliens use to interact with reality, but I am rooting for ocular tentacles).

It is our ability to be able to feel compassion and empathy and to anticipate other peoples moves, to manipulate and destabilise and lie and cheat and fake that makes us superior to any other life form on our planet.

And it is the same capability that makes us believe in god(s). 

But more on this next time. 

I hope this one wasn’t too philosophical or sociological, but to be frank, without understanding what we are and how our most basic means of expression operate, we might become great craftsmen and craftswomen, but I do not believe we can become great artists.

Because to be able to mould reality into whatever we wish it to be, to infuse objective reality with illusions and dreams and to create ideological structures inside even the most common objects, like chairs or butter, we first need to understand reality.

In the past, there were alchemists (the predecessors of modern scientists) and you might think of the contemporary artist as one too — but unlike the alchemists of old, the artist’s words and creations, our intricate ability of expression can actually turn anything into gold. 

Just look at any contemporary art auction today.

IS THIS ART? Wed, 12 Jun 2019 09:11:31 +0000 Countless figures throughout history have tried to explain this incredibly complex question: What is art? And more importantly, what isn’t art?

But still the institutions have no real answer, no common ground upon which they could define a normative of what defines art. Brut art is a problem, so are other outsider artists, and home schooled creatives that defy or just never become part of the institutional system. 

It’s the carpenters that put more than the usual love and attention to detail in building their “consumer objects”. It’s the iPhones and iPads and other designer products that always walk the thin line between art and function.

Then you have others that do not agree with the institutional idea that one needs to even be part of the system to be considered an artist. You only need to have ideas and communicate them with the world via your production.

And in the philosophy of aesthetics — the field that studies this question ontologically — there is even more confusion. A materialist philosopher that believes all reality is only material and no immaterial reality can ever exist, will tell you art is pure matter, pure reciprocity between the object and its perceiver.

But they might also say that art doesn’t even need spectators to exist — like the whole status of art is somehow imbued inside the object that it is representing. Almost comically, some believe art is a magical aura (but of course physical, never metaphysical or non-material) that lives in an object, a special part — almost like an extra organ of the body of that object — that pumps pure artistic energy through it and makes us instantly experience art, if we indeed are knowledgable and receptive enough to perceive it.

But it’s all a load of incoherent and over-theorised bull if you ask me.

For me, all of this began with Descartes, when he decided to divide reality into two connected but distinct realities: the material and immaterial world.

There are even jokes about how the common person in the street is always a cartesian — a follower of Descartes — even if they themselves don’t know it; all average people believe in a body and in a soul as two distinct entities.

Now, I won’t go into the fallacies of such beliefs too much as this is an art channel not a philosophy discussion, but just to give a bit of context, I’d like to present three interesting and extremely precise arguments for the contrary — that art is not an object, but an experience.

Because if art is an experience, we surely can come to understand that truly it is impossible to create a functional theory, a list of checkboxes that anything considered art has to tick to really become art, or even fine art.

The first is by Thomas Nagel, the author of the story titled What It Is Like To Be A Bat, who posed an interesting proposition: 

While humans can understand and imagine the behaviours of creatures, in this case a bat; merely being able to imagine how it would feel to be able to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects, would never really be the same as a bat’s perspective. 

Nagel claims that even if we were able to gradually turn into bats (think Kafka, but more uplifting), our brains would not have been wired as a bat’s from birth; therefore, we would only be able to experience the life and behaviours of a bat, rather than their mindset.

To behave as something isn’t equal to being something, regardless of how much it looks, swims and quacks like a duck, the shocker is, it might just be a rubber ducky. 

And this goes for our language and communication problem too; I could paint a picture of an apple being picked by a woman somewhere in a forest. Some would see a nice lady picking apples, others would see the highly complex concept of Ancestral Sin. Same painting, same communication, immensely different results.

The next story, written by Frank Jackson is also about a woman who’s life is changed because of an apple — not because of eating it but merely by looking at it! Titled What Mary Didn’t Know, it describes a very curious lady who loved natural sciences — the field of colour theory especially. 

She knew everything there was to know about colours; their wavelengths, the numerous psychological effects colours have on us, the various types of receptors that are utilised in our bodies to see them … just about everything. But she had one issue. She had been educated about all of this in a black-and-white room.

Black-and-white books, TV screens, and furniture — for some weird reason even Mary herself is black-and-white, but it is a story and if it was OK for Little Red Riding Hood to be red, I guess Mary can be colourless too.

So Jackson argued: Even though Mary had all the same information about colours that we do, she had never really experienced them and was therefore missing one crucial piece of information; one important bit of quaila, as philosophers like to call these magical bits of subjective experience, namely actually seeing red.

Jackson proposed that when Mary stepped out of her room and saw a red, juicy apple, she not only saw colour for the first time, she in fact learned something new. Something that she couldn’t have learned through any text book or black-and-white YouTube video. 

She gained a new emotional and preceptorial experience — seeing red. (Remember all those people who told us that we can’t learn everything from books, well they were right in a way!)

And the last, and my personal favourite story curiously also evolves around red (philosophers love it for some reason). One of the greatest minds of the 21st century, John Searle wrote a wonderful tale about a talking room.

Titled The Chinese Room, this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980. It describes a room, where one would input a piece of written-down information — be it a question, a statement or just a remark about the weather — and the room, after a period of time, would answer back. All in Chinese for some weird reason, probably because Searle himself said he’s awful at speaking Mandarin (The man speaks more than 6 languages fluently though!).

Well, the room wasn’t some magical artefact from a forgotten time, it was operated by one person. And the interesting fact was, that parson had no idea how to speak or write Mandarin. What he did have though was an assortment of instructions and guidelines on what to do and a giant library of cards with Chinese signs, decorating the walls of the room.

Whenever text was slid through the opening in the main wall, he would open the instruction books at the appropriate page depicting the combination of symbols (he was obviously really efficient at what he did and compensated generously for his job, probably owned a villa and a few Ferraris too).

After locating the right page in the manual, he would then find the appropriate cards on the shelves of the room, align them in the order depicted in the instructions and return the answer back though the slit in the wall. And the person on the outside would be absolutely amazed of how wonderful a computer this contraption was!

But the point of Searle’s work wasn’t to explain away computers by using miniature librarians living in our processors and memory units, he wanted to point out a simple yet profound truth about communication, computation and the mind. One that we have heard twice before, albeit in different iterations and with slightly different points.

Syntax (that is the assortment of signals; be it voice signals, written words or electric currents going to the processors of our computers) does not equal semantics (that is the name we give to meaning; the meaning of a word, a picture, a sign … anything that has some symbolical value to anyone).

The only true way to experience art is to, well, experience it. It’s impossible to not experience something if we wish to even try to comprehend it, let alone understand fully what it is about.

It’s like dreaming about something you have never experienced — I know, dreams almost never look like reality, but to be honest, our dreams don’t just appear as a beam of light from god or some bored alien on Mars that decided to give us a transcendental experience because we’re the chosen one to guide human kind into onto the next level of existence.

It’s all just pieced together by everything we experience during our waking days. Every bit of information was consciously or unconsciously experienced and internalised. It’s the same with art.

You need to be present, you are indeed the key to the question of: What art is? Without anyone to view the Mona Lisa, there is no art, just a peculiar object. 

Because to know what art is, we also need to know what art isn’t. 

But when does art stop to be? Or what if it never even become perceivable to us as art?

In the moment where there are no more men, no more women, and no more children.

And what happens to art then?

It is, like all that is created from an ego, bound to its creator. When he perishes, so does the essence of all his children, leaving behind a heap of empty material shells. But the intricate architectural dams of beavers, the beautiful patterns of various animals and the chirping and poems of all the beautifully performing singing birds. These don’t perish. 

Even if there is no man to hear the song, see the pattern and enjoy the complexity of animal life and their creations they still serve an immediate function. 

If there is a female Nightingale around, the song is heard, if there are beavers, they will enjoy and understand the dams and the tigers will comprehend their intricate skin patterns — each species forming its own personal language. 

And when they’re gone, so are all their features, all their creations.

And you know why? 

Because even if today the thought of a non-sociocentric universe is impossible for most, some things in the world actually weren’t made by us. Neither to amuse or to teach. And because of that, they can last quite a bit longer than our concept of art ever will.

Art is an experience, not an object. But it isn’t only a material experience — and no, I’m not saying it’s magic that makes us live and die, because the last time I checked nobody wrote Emet on my head and magically made me a real boy the way the golem becomes alive in Jewish folklore.

But the point to take home is, the more you know, the more you understand about the world around you, the more things will give you the same experience of art, of the sublime.

Because while surely not any object can produce the same power of artistic pleasure — for me it’s a mid-late Rothko painting, for you it might be a conceptual piece with hay and neon or a realistic portrait of Loui XV or just a nice handmade drawing of your child about how much they love you.

The object is only as important as our understanding of it. That’s why learning is paramount. To be a good artist, and even a good spectator we need to constantly expand our horizons. Because the day we stop learning is the day we create a canon in our life.

And as with every determinate belief that only so and so is an artist and the others are imposters, we inevitably become blind to the ineffable vastness of what art really is. 

Art is everything. But to the inexperienced and blind, it is less than nothing, because even nothing takes something form us, whereas a foreign object to a closed mind doesn’t even register. It is like it never even existed.

So to truly experience reality — at least a much of it as we possibly can — we need to stay humble, open and childlike in our awe towards the world. If nothing else, we owe it to either God or our parents or ourselves or just to the lovely abyss that the nihilists of us enjoy staring down.

We owe it to whatever makes us stand-up in the morning to give everything the world has to offer a chance. Maybe we will find a new thing we like, but it’s much more likely we’ll discover a previously completely hidden part of reality that was really just hiding in plain sight.

What is art then?

Everything for those of us that aren’t afraid to look.   

ON FINDING YOUR PLACE AND MAKING A STAND Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:00:40 +0000 People have two intrinsic desires; to know themselves and to find a place in their environment. We constantly search for better ways, a clearer image of who we are and continuously try to place that projection of ourselves into society and our environment at large.

But a lot of us make a grave mistake when conducting our search. A mistake we might not even recognise, but that defines and ultimately controls our inability to find our true way in life.

Predominantly it is the artists of any society that are at the vanguard of this exploration of self and as such at the mercy of the powers that command it. We do not adhere to any group, we do not belong to any tribe or to any one people, not even to those of our own kind — the other artists among us. We are the outsiders that dare to venture into the unknown, and look at society from the outside in.

In nature, the understanding of any closed system is done by observing it from the outside, never as part of the system itself. Because only when any happening is observed as a whole, does the observer have the ability to glimpse the intricate details of form and function that occur inside of it and that give it substance.

As the astronaut that ventures into space is usually struck with the totality of what our planet really is — and more importantly what it isn’t, namely neither the centre nor the entirety of existence, merely a speck of dust in the eyes of the ineffable universe — is he or she able to begin to understand the bigger picture.

Detail is of course important, without it life becomes dull, mechanical and empty of its essence, but similarly as is seen when we might first learn how to draw a portrait — when we begin not with the eyelashes and freckles of a face, but the crude form and shape of its entirety.

When we start to observe ourselves and begin exploring our bodies and minds, we therefore start to ponder what we think is the entirety of the universe. The newly born child cannot fathom the existence of anything beyond itself, even the mother is part of it, the same way its hands and feet are its own.

Only when the infant is taken from her, in the initial stages of its upbringing and the bond between mother and child is made physically more distant — for example when she puts the infant into its bed or when she has to leave for a longer period of time and the infant is left to its own — does this dream of being one with everything in the world begin to break.

Cracks in the surface of the known begin to appear and the child encounters immense pressure and resistance towards the fact that all it thought and felt was but an illusion. That the unbreakable bond between mother and child is but that, a bond made not of flesh and blood, but energy and perception, grounded deep inside the structure of both of their bodies but not physically connected as a whole.

While this energy or emotion cannot be explained by pure language, the same way love and hate cannot be drawn up in a diagram, other means of comprehension take place. The child will feel this bond, but never be able to fully explain it in such a fashion that would do it justice.

They say artists are people that were able to keep their inner child alive and attentive throughout their upbringing well into the age of adulthood. But what they sparsely mention is the actual power that such a person possesses inside of themselves.

Others, who “grew up” and melted effortlessly with their surrounding (small as it may be, compared to the entirety that life is able to offer us), usually lose this connection with their inner child, they give up their ability of attentiveness and are never really able to experience the power of reconstruction that those of us, those that kept our childlike awe, are able to command.

There really are only two basic human needs; expansion and the desire to overcome entropy. All beings need to expand as this is their basic purpose, their base code or their core instinct. It does not really matter what we choose to call this urge, that all of our personalities are built upon, the important fact is that we come to understand the nature and importance of this driver. 

In the end it is the main force that makes us wake up in the morning and choose to go to work, rather than sleep, eat and copulate until we can no more. And when we truly understand the nature of this essence, we are able to control it.

While most people who forgot or stopped cultivating this power and perspective of the world would believe that it is their minds that are in the driver’s seat — manoeuvring the slippery slopes of life and guiding them to whatever they believe is their purpose (if indeed they have even begun asking this complex and important question) — the reality is, the conscious mind is but the servant of the body.

The real drivers are emotion, instinct and reaction.

While our minds begin their journeys as godlike totalities, as if everything is one and we are indeed everything there is, our bodies never behave in such a fashion. The lungs do not operate as a single system, dislocated form the heart or kidneys; all organs function as one unity and only through this reciprocity are we even able to stay alive.

In order to do so, all parts need to function on the basis that they are always connected, always in tune with the rest of the orchestra that plays the symphony of life that we call our bodies. If one part looses rhythm or is out of tune, the whole system suffers; an acid reflux does not only hinder the absorption of nutrients into the body, it makes the whole system unbalanced and destroys it over a longer period of time, eventually to the point where it cannot function anymore.

This is the reason why the holistic approach to life, happiness, health etc. worked so well in the past. Of course issues like the inability of many practitioners of holistic medicine to keep up with the latest scientific discoveries hinders their success in today’s society and throws a bad light upon them, marking them as charlatans or delusional hippies.

And this misunderstanding is what interests me a lot, as who else is the charlatan, the hippie, the outsider that still believes in fairytales and energies if not the artist? And as the contemporary healer that wishes to evade being called a fake, they must learn both the formal and functional aspect of the bodies they are studying.

Form is what reality seems to be. It is the embodiment of reciprocity; how a particular part of life is shaped and out of what materials, defines its ability to interact with all the other parts of the system it is part of.

The importance of anatomy, of colour theory and perspective for us artists, the indispensable knowledge of chemistry, nutrition, biology for medical practitioners and all the other fields of study that each profession is built upon — these are the materials with which we gain knowledge and power to interact with the systems we are part of. And only by knowing the form of the objects we encounter in life, the true essence of what they are capable of, can we begin to explore their functions.

Function, in contrast to form, is not inherent to nature; nothing in reality is ever made with a purpose or a certain plan of how it will be used. It’s our hubris and our impeded mode of operation that makes it seem as if all the life that surrounds us was made for a purpose, when in fact nothing is.

But this isn’t a melancholic or depressed observation upon the world, merely an objective assessment. We are programmed to see purpose in everything we do, because it is this ability that has secured our evolution into the most advanced species on our planet.

It is not something that is inherently false or a lie, because it is one of the most indispensable traits of human kind — our ability to see function in form is beyond anything in the world, and while this ability is present in most other animals, it varies in effect from species to species.

While a mockingbird will see function in sticks and other various debris when it is guided by instinct to build a nest, the ape will see the stick as a tool for hunting termites. We, on the other hand, will see potential firewood, or a tool to help us climb or walk or kill.

And yet, the stick stays the same object throughout its usage, its form does not change, because form does not command function, it merely provides the ability to embody it.

Function on the other hand is an illusion, a fleeting moment of any objects existence, projected upon it by the being that is interacting with it. Function is born out of perception and attention.

A quick stroll through a garden will provide little focus and merely an average amount of attention will be given to ones surroundings; the plant life may be examined to find the most suitable path to be taken, the flowers may be observed for their colour and shape, and beauty could even be found radiating from them, but the true form of the various plants, animals and other inanimate objects like stones and the earth beneath them will elude us.

Only if we stop and take our time and focus our attention on each singular piece of mater that resides in the garden will we be able to venture further into our understanding and explore the reality of the garden in more depth.

Rules and systems will appear; Darwin found incredible connections between the various species that resided on the Galapagos islands only by intently studying them and focusing his attention. Where a fisherman may see only the size of their pray, the type of fish and its ability to be eaten safely without causing harm to his body, Darwin saw a lot more.

From the various colourings of scales, different shapes of the head and fins to the slightest divergencies among the species he was studying — nothing was left unobserved, and nothing was deemed unimportant.

Only when function is not projected upon an object via any utilitarian demands of the object, to be assimilated into any already existing system — like the way coal is seen as fuel for the steam engine, wood as material for a wardrobe or table — only if all utilitarian aspects and preconceptions are put aside and pure fascination begins to take precedent, can the totality of form be revealed.

This is where artists operate and where the true function and power of art resides. Without the need to consume the material that surrounds us, only to play with it and learn of its form can we actually discover its true nature.

We question reality by exhibiting chairs as physical objects, as written statements and as flat images on silver halide paper, we create forms that never seem to really serve any actual purpose, merely serving themselves, exposing themselves in their true, natural from. 

A form without function.

This is pure self exploration, pure observation without interference and as the nature of the human mind is to always interfere, always project its needs and wants upon the world, it is incredibly hard to produce.

Not that making an object without function is hard, one needs to merely take a stroll in the wild to find innumerable amounts of functionless objects; from the trees and bushes to the stones, leaves and dirt that are scattered around the forest. Nothing has any purpose, merely form.

The true issue is not with the matter that creates reality, but with the spectator that observes and egotistically judges it on the merit of functionality. This is why the most important element of any artistic object is the spectator, not the object itself nor the artist that made it.

If those that view and experience art cannot let go and do not possess the necessary mental tools of observation needed to truly try to comprehend the artistic experience, they will falter and end up seeing what they want to see, not what is really there.

A painting of a single boat in stormy seas is not just a depiction of a boat and of a sea, but it also isn’t merely a metaphor for perseverance, resistance or entropy either. Neither is it just a collection of pigments and oils or plastics, smeared skilfully onto a woven piece of cloth that has been stretched onto a wooden frame. 

It is all of the above and innumerable things more, all at the same time. While the average mind may not be able to discern more than a few traits of the material, the skilled and knowledgable spectator will see more — but never the entirety.

Because, even if we’d like to, we cannot delight in seeing the world as it is, we cannot just decide not to observe matter without the embedded functions we project onto it and take pleasure in it, and thus we never really see reality for what it is.

Not because it’s impossible to look at a stone and only see a stone, but because seeing a stone as what it really is does not provide us with any stimulation, excitement or even interest. 

Reciprocity, as the base stimuli of any being is guided by emotion, by all the various receptors in our body, the myriad of hormones, nerves and other cells reciprocating and communicating with each other in order to provide us with the incredibly necessary information about our surroundings.

Information, that alerts us about danger, food and other vital traits of our surroundings that we as beings need to be constantly aware of, in order for us to function and survive the clutches of entropy for as long as we can.

But even such rudimentary perception as reciprocity — the ability to perceive, experience and react on a purely emotional level — does not show reality for what it is, because even our existence as beings is a force; we are never still, our minds constantly demand growth, change, anything at all to not be bored. 

Boredom or a lack of stimulation kills the mind and as such, our perception projects function onto reality in order to be able to function properly inside of it. Without this projection we could not see the use of anything, we could to imagine what a spoon is for or why one would wan to own and drive a car. All functions would elude us and with them we would lose all of our control over nature and life itself. 

Try an experiment and seek to experience any object in your surroundings by only looking or feeling it intently while emptying your mind of any thought about the experience itself. You may get images, that pop into your mind about its shape, your feelings towards it (especially if it is dear to you or holds any other emotional value, that is specific to you).

Whatever the effect that object has on your thinking, let your thoughts wander away the same way they came — like waves of ideas, slowly subsiding back into the unconsciousness and focus on keeping the sea of the mind absolutely still.

You will still feel the object, you will still reciprocate its shape, when you touch it. You will still smell its scent when it is near enough and all of your other senses will still operate and provide information about it, reacting constantly but never really exposing its true materiality, only your ability to respond to the various stimuli that you can physically experience and comprehend.

Pure form cannot be seen, because it is hidden beneath all the various layers of ideology, utilitarianism and even our own biological functions of perception. This doesn’t mean though that the ideas of prominent thinkers like Kant are true and that reality is invisible to us; we all see reality, we all experience matter and time and we do so truthfully to the extent of our abilities.

The illusion that one can never really see reality does not lay in the observation, but in the lack of one. We may feel and think about a certain trait as if we understood it, but are never able to really grasp the meaning of it. It changes constantly and when we change — and with us our desires, wants, wishes and demands of life — objective reality changes with us. The function of reality changes.

Only by understanding deeply that reality bears no function to itself, only form for the sake of form and its capacity to be, can we actually see reality. And such a reality is completely empty. Void of anything but itself. 

This is what Buddhism teaches about the path to attaining enlightenment, and what all other religions in their own fashion and style preach about the highest understanding of ourselves. But it is also what many of us artists are constantly searching for.

And this is where the conversation about finding your place and making a stand actually begins, because even though power and understanding are so disparate, most of us never get to grasp the real differences and struggle all of our lives crudely grasping for both, but attain neither.

QUALITY AND QUANTITY Sun, 26 May 2019 19:00:11 +0000 A lot of people today speak of quantity as the defining factor in getting your message into the world — with Gary Vaynerchuk being at the forefront of this movement. And while I have been following this rule in the past half of the year, I have probably missed 3 or 4 of my daily blogs and have been focusing on making as much content as possible, now I think the time has come to reevaluate this model.

I still think quantity plays an enormous role in content production — especially as the amount of blog posts, podcasts and images on the web is increasing exponentially — but there is one important truth that many of us may overlook in this conquest of trying to reach the eyes and ears of the masses. 

Quality is king and quantity is his servant.

I get why the amount of information is being pushed as the most important factor; too many of us focus endlessly on tweaking and re-editing our content, too many of us spend hours making our images, texts and videos “perfect” and thus miss a lot of opportunities of growth and consequently reach.

The 80/20 rule still applies to everything in the universe; 80% of effect is produced by 20% of our effort. Of course, we shouldn’t confuse this with the idea that we only have to do 20% of the work and get 80% of the rewards. 

We still need to do all of the work. And regardless of how much “all of the work” actually is — 5 min or 5 years of input, it doesn’t really matter — the effect is always more or less the same; most of what we do will not bear any fruits, but a fraction will. And that fraction will create the most effect.

Here the real argument for quality begins to take shape; if 100% of what I did was only average or “merely” good, the effects of it will embody the same kind of qualitative force. Good things lead to good results, average work produces average products and services, but excellence, excellence can’t but create exceptionality.

In order for any one of us to reach excellence, we have to first begin our path with average tools, common techniques and boring (and many times tedious) practice. But after such a rhythm has been established, after the almost masochistic pleasures of repetition and rigorous practice become part of our being, I believe all of us need to again venture further into the unknown.

And this means reevaluating everything we have been doing up to this point. A child may have enormous dependence on his training wheels when learning how to ride his bike, but after they succeed in mastering balance, speed and manoeuvring, the support has to be taken away, exposing the reality that all they have done up to that point was mere practice for the real thing.

I feel as though my daily blog was exactly such a training wheel; it made me accountable, if not to all of you lovely souls that read it, I was also accountable to myself. It defined me as someone that writes a daily blog, someone that makes videos about art and someone that records podcasts.

Now, I need to become someone that makes exceptional articles, not merely articles. And the only path to exceptionality and true mastery is through quality, precision and practice. Therefore I would like to inform all of you, that the daily blog will still exist, but will not be constrained by the superfluous idea of time, rather I wish to focus more on the quality of content that I provide to all of you, and of course to myself.

In the end, all we do — regardless of whether we write, sing, paint or dance — we do so as a form of diary, a succession of traces that we leave upon the world. It doesn’t matter if our creations ever get exposed to the public; even those of us that never publish our creations and keep our diaries, paintings and songs to ourselves , we inevitably all do the same. 

We create marks upon the world, knowingly or not, by accident or in order to be remembered. Regardless though of why we do what we do, I believe one thing is for certain. 

Such marks should be born out of the highest efforts that we can endure, if not to grow, at least to know that whatever we did mattered, perhaps to some, or maybe none, but always to ourselves.

THE TRAP OF MASTERING A CRAFT Sat, 25 May 2019 17:00:00 +0000 They say we are born as empty slates, pure white canvases onto which life leaves its marks and in the end produces a singular, unique imprint of colours, shapes and forms. While this may or may not be true, today I would like to think about the process itself.

Whether or not we truly are immaculate at our beginning is an incredibly complex and interesting question, but at the same time it rather easily leads to fruitless philosophising and in the end has very little utilitarian value to us. 

As we are not in control of where we are born or who gets to be in charge of our upbringing and how, I view it more as a onetime event, a mark of origin that any one of us needs to explore, but after we come to understand it, the main power that all of us possess is to change whatever circumstances have been given to us. 

Indeed, we can change everything we are, if we so desire.

Exactly this ability to change is incredible, almost unprecedented in the world (we still have little to no idea about the true amount of intellect that animals really possess) and with each and everyone of us having this power at our disposal, I believe it is incredibly important to really understand it and cultivate it throughout our lives.  

We start off in a complete foreign environment, we don’t just not understand the world around us, we are so displaced and unconnected to reality that at the beginning we indeed do not even understand our own bodies. 

A child will marvel and amuse itself by moving its feet; shaking and twisting them and delighting in the control and understanding such manoeuvres give it. But as a person evolves, they will become more in tune with their bodies and their environment.

They will learn how to move their limbs in such a fashion that allows them to walk, run, jump, crawl. From there, they might find other uses for their newly acquired tools, like opening cans, throwing things and drawing or painting crude squiggles on walls and other places their parents might not agree with.

After each new ability is learned, they might hone their skills even more, becoming proficient at throwing and running to the degree that they’ll be able to participate effortlessly in various sports and other social activities.

They might also learn how to draw so well that they’ll be able to precisely depict reality with their images; drawing their dog or cat, so that anyone is able to recognise the kind of animal from the drawing they created.

Soon, they will intuitively be able to draw more complex relations of reality; the sizes of various objects will tell of their importance to them, they will observe and create images, based on the dominance hierarchy that surrounds them in their homes as well as their surrounding environment.

If not too constrained, they will incorporate other interests into the drawings; building imaginary landscapes, that combine their hobbies, favourite objects and loved ones and friends. In the end, combining all of their interests, polarising them more and more to the point of mastery.

Then they might exhibit their work and show the world their intricate understanding on anatomy, human behaviour or the exquisite nature of their brushwork. What started out as various, small interests that sparked flames of curiosity will evolve into a wide array of knowledge and understanding about the world and themselves.

But some, equally in search of attaining mastery in their field will religiously practice the few skills that pertain to that field and nothing more; by such merit, the violinist should only know how to play the violin, the sculptor should not care about paintings, nor should the expert shoemaker be interested in bridges or architecture.

But this commonly held belief is the true poison in the well of creativity. Because mastery of the creative potential that each of us harbours does not happen through our proficiency with one specific tool, but our ability to wander and be curious about a myriad of different tools in conjunction with each-other.

Not to negligently scrape the surface of each of them and then pass by, but to get to the point of true understanding, and then letting go. I think a lot of us tend to either overdo our proficiency in one subject, to the point it becomes stale and dreadful, or our ability to carelessly wander the world like an open buffet — trying various things, but never really settling enough on each to be able to really get the hang of them.

The true point of mastery therefore is in the balance of both; a kind of eager and playful curiosity on one side, complimented with intense rigour and dedication on the other. I think only those of us that find this balance and don’t waste our time straying from our path of curiosity and exploration in the end attain true mastery of our interests. 

And while mastery surely is the most niche ability a person could posses, its road to attainment could not be more scattered, diverse and broad. I guess the main goal is to be prepared to build ones house in stone, while not being afraid to leave the second it is done, in search of a better way to live, a stronger place to call home.