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January 9, 2012
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John Baldessari’s letter in Letters to a Young Artist Good advice from Baldessari, reiterated from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which we see repeated often: do things because you cannot not do them. I doubt that anyone’s motivations can ever be so completely pure; we are all of us mixtures of ambitions and desires and influences and the need to fulfill particular visions of ourselves as a sort of person. The instinct for fame and fortune isn’t necessarily a mustache-twirling, melodramatic sign of idiocy and villainous intent, it is part and parcel of being a person who has grown up with advertising as a texture of one’s everyday experience and the desire to cultivate a persona is as close to natural as we may hope to get. It’s difficult to get away from the impulse to perform ourselves. I am starting to see the common thread in the art that I am drawn to as being the process of making strange the codes and habits of beauty, without necessarily needing to abandon the deconstructed pieces that made up some architecture of beauty that we now understand to be entirely made up. I want art that consciously reinvents, I suppose, that allows magic and make-believe alongside knowledge and skepticism. I love that he signs off with “Yrs in art.” 

John Baldessari’s letter in Letters to a Young Artist

Good advice from Baldessari, reiterated from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which we see repeated often: do things because you cannot not do them. I doubt that anyone’s motivations can ever be so completely pure; we are all of us mixtures of ambitions and desires and influences and the need to fulfill particular visions of ourselves as a sort of person. The instinct for fame and fortune isn’t necessarily a mustache-twirling, melodramatic sign of idiocy and villainous intent, it is part and parcel of being a person who has grown up with advertising as a texture of one’s everyday experience and the desire to cultivate a persona is as close to natural as we may hope to get. It’s difficult to get away from the impulse to perform ourselves. I am starting to see the common thread in the art that I am drawn to as being the process of making strange the codes and habits of beauty, without necessarily needing to abandon the deconstructed pieces that made up some architecture of beauty that we now understand to be entirely made up. I want art that consciously reinvents, I suppose, that allows magic and make-believe alongside knowledge and skepticism.

I love that he signs off with “Yrs in art.” 

(Source: )


(via printed-ink)

Notes:

  1. blondeleadingtheblind reblogged this from flailingandfailing and added:
    This gives me hope.
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  4. onlycolorandlight reblogged this from printed-ink and added:
    Good advice from Baldessari, reiterated from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which we see repeated often: do things...
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  18. onelastcheer reblogged this from humanwrites and added:
    To all the artists within us, be it a painter, graphic designer, thespian, musician, writer, and all lovers of art.
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  21. humanwrites reblogged this from printed-ink and added:
    I need this book in my life.
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