With the commoditisation of paintings, sculptures and other wall furniture that one can buy on Etsy, a question pops up: Are we artists or artisans?
I think our main concern as creatives should be to first have a nice little talk with ourselves over some coffee and maybe a bagel if you don’t care about your carb intake and figure out the basics of what our craft is all about.
Story is Everything is a booklet I prepared for United Art Space and in this podcast, Michelle and I discuss the importance of storytelling, narrative and context in art. And, if you like to get to know more about Michelle's project United Art Space, here are the links: [United Art Space Website](https://www.unitedartspace.org/), [United Art Space Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/UnitedArtSpace/), U[nited Art Space Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/unitedartspace/). Enjoy!
Unlike the still common belief that making great art will attract people who might like and even buy it, the reality for most of us is the exact opposite. You can create the most beautiful piece of art, but if you are unable to get it “out there”, your chances for an exhibition or sale — even just a retweet — are slim to none.
While browsing the web yesterday I came across a Twitter post from whoever manages the The Art Market Twitter account, sharing an article on Artsy about new art and design fair in Brooklyn called Object & Thing, and the thing that stuck out like a fat splinter in my pinky was the language they used …
The amount of CVs and portfolios the average gallery receives on a daily basis is immense, so having a good tactic when trying to approach one is imperative.
Even though we live in the digital age, the more or less most important factor to take into consideration when trying to get signed is where your targeted gallery is located. Because even though you could theoretically email your portfolio to any place in the world, the majority of gallerists appreciate artists that are in close proximity to where their institution operates and this is because of several factors.
We continue this series of podcasts revolving around the question: “What makes something art?” with a small dissection of what the phenomenon of art actually is. And as we learned in the previous one, it all comes down to these three: the Artist, the Artwork and the Viewer.
While each person is different in almost innumerable ways, we all follow the same basic modes of operation and have the same needs, so knowing these needs and understanding them on a deep level doesn’t just make us immensely better artists, but also incredibly proficient spectators.
And to excel in art, one has to be both.
A well prepared CV is the corner stone of any application, but unlike financial advisors, marketeers and other professionals, artists can’t really do much with the standard form that so many others use — aka. we usually aren’t employed anywhere and McDonalds doesn’t really count.
You can also download my CV [here](https://www.matejtomazin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/CV-Matej-Tomažin.pdf), if you’d like to see how what I yap about looks in real life.
Religions have defined cultures and people since the beginning of time; man time, not time time — unless you ask a theologian. They will tell you that both are pretty much the same and that ancient man rode dinosaurs and made babies the same way sponges do; asexually through budding. This is when a small piece of sponge is broken off but is still able to survive and grow into another sponge, and surprisingly this fact is able to explain the genesis story quite effectively if you really think about it.
Jokes aside though, today’s blunder is focused on the essential functions of religion — especially its ability to placate the basic fear, that all of us humans carry inside ourselves, but rarely speak of. The fear of death.
I guess most of us don’t become artists, but end up artists. What I mean by this is that as the kids that grow up in an engineer household, filled with technical models, equations and maths, can end up loving physics as much — if not more — than their parents, they ultimately have no control over the fact that they were born into such an environment. No-one does.
We could’ve just as easily been born a carpenter’s son or a lawyer’s daughter — or even not at all for that matter — the chances of us being who we are because of where we started out are almost ineffable in the grander scheme of things.