Bookshelf: Art & Fear
Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
David Bayles and Ted Orland; 1993, The Image Continuum Press
Here’s something a little different for the Bookshelf: a book that has literally nothing at all to do with leadership or management. If that seems like a reach for a channel specifically about leadership and management…well, I don’t think it is. And I’ll explain why — read on!
Sometime in the mid-to-late-90s a good friend of mine, a practicing artist and professional Art Director, loaned me a copy of Art & Fear. I read it through very quickly (it’s a slim volume), and then we discussed it at length over the subsequent weeks and months.
While I didn’t necessarily agree with — or indeed at that point really understand — everything it had to say, I was nonetheless profoundly affected by it. A few years later I picked up my own copy, and then…didn’t read it again for a long, long time.
I have just recently re-read it.
First, let me say it’s wild to me that the Bookshop.org blurb about this book — in 2024 — calls it “an underground classic.”
“Word-of-mouth response alone — now enhanced by internet posting — has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity nationally.”
I had no idea. Other than my Art Director friend a quarter-century ago, I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone else who has read Art & Fear, and I’ve spent my entire adult life in some form of artistic endeavor or another. But apparently somebody’s been reading it. Let me know if that’s you — let’s compare notes!
Second, I have changed a lot since that first read. Not only did I have a full career’s worth of work as a creative professional, but in my role as a leader and manager in the space I got to experience — and hopefully support and nourish — new generations behind me.
I probably would have said that I was an artist when I began this career, and maybe I’m starting to think about myself that way again, at least a little. In the intervening years not so much. But I did think of a lot of my team members as artists and the work we were doing as artistry.
I suspect my reading of this book early on laid some groundwork for that.
“But while you may feel you’re just pretending that you’re an artist, there’s no way to pretend you’re making art. Go ahead, try writing a story while pretending you’re writing a story. Not possible. Your work may not be what curators want to exhibit or publishers want to publish, but those are different issues entirely.”
A large part of my nagging desire to read this book again came from the memory of a single line.
I remembered it as having been as important to my career as just about any other wise observation or pithy advice I have ever experienced. I hoped that I was remembering it right.
I found it. Turns out it’s from very early in the book — page seventeen, in fact. Surprisingly, the line is almost a throwaway, in the middle of a paragraph about the “correspondence between imagination and execution.”
It goes like this:
“And it’s true, most artists don’t daydream about making great art — they daydream about having made great art.”
That quote, for whatever reason, resonated so deeply with me that I basically turned it into an entire operating philosophy for my professional life.
Anybody who has worked with me in the last twenty years has heard me say, “you can’t have done it until you do it.” That notion, so important to both my own personal ethos as well as my management approach, came directly from this idea of daydreaming about “having made great art.”
If you had asked me a week ago, before I went and re-read it, I’d likely have said this was a primary thesis of the book…not a brief aside in the middle of a paragraph.
It’s funny how these things stay with us. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to hear what we need to hear, when we need to hear it.
“For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.”
Of particular interest to 2024 Andrew and the Ars Pandemonium project — re: “professional” creativity — the authors spend some time on the differences between “art” and “craft,” and the implications of what they call “commercial art.” I don’t necessarily agree with every move the book makes here, but there’s some great food for thought. For instance, I love the notion that “craft is the visible edge of art.”1
Bayles and Orland draw some thoughtful distinctions that are illuminating and not judgmental. They do not declare that “art” is a more noble pursuit than “craft,” or that “commercial art” is somehow less valuable than some impenetrable self-sealing “art-for-art’s-sake.” In fact, they actively oppose those ideas. Nonetheless, the book isn’t really speaking to the craftsperson, but rather the artist.
They take a number of approaches to define this difference. Sometimes this really heady stuff still manages to land satisfyingly:
“In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there’s a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished — but more innovative — than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos — demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship — are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments.”
They also consider the siren call of “technical standards” — the sense that technique is the same as artistry:
“More insidiously, technical standards have a way of taking on all the trappings of aesthetic standards.”
The authors frame this issue using photography. They discuss the technical difficulty in achieving “rich blacks and subtle high values” in a photographic print, and how the pursuit of that challenge ended up outweighing actual aesthetic concerns in the medium for a long time:
“Subtlety of tone became, often quite literally, the primary content. An equivalent fate befell much twentieth century symphonic music, which was seduced by arcane harmonic theory to the degree that its critical audience drifted progressively to other idioms (like jazz) that remained grounded in the rhythms of the real world.”
“While mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it’s still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal — a ‘right answer’ — than to give form to a new idea.”
This rings especially true (even prescient) to me in our current world where there are almost infinite technological aids to creation, but not necessarily any more aesthetic sophistication than there ever has been.
“Eames furniture and Avedon fashion spreads prove that art can prevail even at the extremes of commerce and fluff.”
Along similar lines, the authors discuss art specifically created for commercial purposes.
Near the beginning of the book, they note how perilous artmaking can feel for the artist:
“Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.”2
Later on, they reiterate this notion in a slightly different way (externally focused as opposed to internally focused, in a sense):
“You’re expected to make art that’s intimately (perhaps even painfully) personal — yet alluring and easily grasped by an audience that has likely never known you personally.”
But then they suggest:
“With commercial art this issue is often less troublesome since approval from the client is primary, and other rewards appropriately secondary. But for most art there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?”
I’m not sure I 100% agree here. Sure, having a “client” (or in some contexts an Art Director or an Executive Producer or a VP of Design or whatever) does provide some cover — that is, it’s a little easier to dissociate and just think, well, I gave them what they wanted and that’s my job.
But that only goes so far. Eventually the work gets experienced by the larger audience. And at that point, I’d argue you’re right back to the same sense of exposure as ever.
Also, I was a little surprised by the sudden and seemingly unmotivated attack on the word “creativity.” Seriously, in the middle of a page there’s a box standing out from the rest of the text. In the box, in a heading font, is the word: “Crea**vity” (<- spelled like that). Below that it reads:
“Readers may wish to note that nowhere in this book does the dreaded C-word appear. Why should it? Do only some people have ideas, confront problems, dream, live in the real world and breathe air?”
This made little sense to me in structure or content. This is a book about artists: sure the word “creativity” does have some difficult history to contend with,3 but for crying out loud I cannot believe it’s worse than the word “artist!”
Maybe the “Crea**vity” box is sarcasm? If so, <whoosh>, right over my head.
“The question that probably served as the seed crystal for this book was posed to the authors nearly twenty years earlier.”
I mentioned that I have changed a lot since I first read this book. And so I have. But the whole world has changed a lot, too! 30 years is a long time, but this 30 years seems especially important relative to the project of this book: examining the artist and their relationship to their art, and that art’s relationship to the world and culture around it.
Look, it can be hard to remember that the World Wide Web didn’t even exist when this book was published, “social media” was at least ten years away, the ubiquity of a camera in every pocket fifteen, the dominance of “streaming media” twenty.
The way any of us create, share, experience, appreciate, even purchase artistic work is remarkably different now. Hell, I bought this book on paper…because back then, that’s the only way books worked!
And even more than that, according to that quote above the book was twenty years in the making, meaning that at least some of the thinking behind it is now fifty years old.
Yet, the book doesn’t generally feel as outdated as it might.
For one thing, history that was history in 1993 is…well, still history. Observing the difference between Rembrandt’s and Pollock’s paint application techniques is still a viable observation.4
And truthfully, many of the big, important questions about artmaking don’t really change — people are pretty much people, art is pretty much art.
Sometimes the book is so knowing, so perceptive, the insight feels almost creepy, whether it’s talking about the artist or their art. Like this:
“The fear that you’re only pretending to do art is the (readily predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials. After all, you know better than anyone else the accidental nature of much that appears in your art, not to mention all those elements you know originated with others (and even some you never even intended but which the audience has read into your work). It’s easy to imagine that real artists know what they’re doing, and that they — unlike you — are entitled to feel good about themselves and their art.”
Or this:
“The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.”
Those observations are completely timeless: you could publish them today and they’d feel true and insightful and devastating-yet-comforting in the same way they did 30 years ago. And the book is full of that kind of stuff.
But while, upon re-reading, the book felt less anachronistic than I was afraid it would, it is definitely of its time. Phrases like “idiot savant” appear occasionally, some of the language is more gendered than it needs to be, and most of the broad statements about “humanity” are supported by evidence from Europe and the US. It can be a little cringey in 2024, despite being enlightened-ish in 1993.
If it reads like the thoughts of a couple of old white men with pretty charmed careers — it is! But they’re awfully smart and thoughtful old white men with a lot of really valuable things to say about art and the creative process.
It isn’t intended to be some kind of pan-cultural inclusionist polemic…and it isn’t! If some of its purview is a little narrower than it might be, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
That said, the book does spend some time on notions of authenticity, which was a pretty hot subject at the time of its publication. Its approach doesn’t tend to feel particularly modern (why would it?), but it takes a stab:
“Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists — people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a german shepherd at a hundred feet — casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman.”
I feel like we’ve got a somewhat more nuanced understanding of appropriation these days, and I think we're a little more skeptical of “authenticity” as such anyway. But the authors’ point is nonetheless well taken.
Then again, at one point, the very specific age of the book becomes apparent. As they discuss the artist’s relationship with the larger cultural world, the authors get themselves a little worked up about some contemporary concerns:
“In many cases, the art you make today will reach its audience tomorrow only because of a vast societal network geared to arts education, funding, criticism, publication, exhibition and performance.
In many other cases, unfortunately, your art will only reach the world in spite of this network. Many attempts to introduce art to the larger world simply give evidence of the uneasy fit in our society between economics and beliefs. In many quarters art is viewed as dangerous, unnecessary, elitist, expensive — and dependent on the patronage of effete East Coast liberals for its survival. Artists themselves fare little better, being widely portrayed as subversive weirdos who not only enjoy Living In Sin, but are probably doing it off Your Tax Dollars as well!”
“One of the more celebrated examples of mowing down the messenger — and everyone else in sight — involved Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer who made a set of images overtly romanticizing homosexuality.”
Those of us of a certain age clearly remember the NEA battles of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Mostly, it was sanctimonious disingenuity from the usual reactionary right-wing goobers, directed at vulnerable, already-marginalized creative iconoclasts. And the book is rightfully deeply critical of the treatment Mapplethorpe and his work received at the hands of these dopes.
Still, the authors’ ultimate conclusion on this subject feels weak to me:
“The most amazing aspect of this American morality play was not that the government would place self-interest above principle when it felt threatened, but that no one foresaw this coming from miles down the road. A reminder from history: the American Revolution was not financed with matching Grants from the Crown.”
That’s pretty facile, isn’t it? We did see it coming! And the government didn’t feel threatened, as such — nobody was taking up arms in some revolution.
Some of us would argue that the government’s “self-interest” is precisely in cultivating a vibrant and supportive environment for artistic expression, up to and including, yes, “matching grants” for challenging work. What these ghouls were engaged in was less “self-interest” so much as fear-mongering, othering, and cynical demagoguery.5
I know Art & Fear isn’t trying to be any kind of political statement, but that whole episode was political to its very core, and the authors’ apparent attempt to rise above that nonsensical fracas, while understandable, is a little unsatisfying.
“The really critical decisions facing every artist — like, say, knowing when to stop — cannot be learned from viewing end results. For that matter, a finished piece gives precious few clues as to any questions the artist weighed while making the object.”
The book also takes on arts education, and this section begins by damning it with what has to be some all-time great faint-praise:
“The authors would like to open this discussion with a radical proposition — namely, that University art programs do serve some useful purpose. Admittedly not a large purpose. And generally not their stated purpose. But some purpose.”
That’s a hell of a start!
However, it seems to veer unknowingly into its own trap at times. Take this passage:
“The author recalls once serving on a university search committee while it compared two applications, one listing three years teaching for the local Parks & Recreation summer program, the other attesting to an equivalent tenure on the art factually at Harvard. Under state hiring guidelines, we were required to accord the two records equal ranking — once the requirement for ‘three years teaching experience’ had been met, discriminating on the basis of quality was specifically forbidden.”
Now, given the otherwise skeptical and critical tone of the chapter, I expected this paragraph to celebrate the mechanism that prohibited this committee from simply reinforcing the insular elitism of the system: I thought it was going to say, “see, experience can come from anywhere, talent is talent, if we put our received-wisdom about institutional imprimatur aside, we can broaden our scope.”
But, alas, no. It becomes clear that it is actually critiquing the restriction and the author would have been so much happier valuing the Harvard experience more highly. It’s a bit of seemingly blind acquiescence to the very kind of elitism that the chapter otherwise inveighs. Again, it might not be wrong, but it seems a little myopic.
Still, though, I was amused by this observation about art texts (given, of course, what this very book is):
“Books on art, even books on artists, characteristically have little to say about actually making art. They may offer a sprinkling of romantic parables about ‘the artist’s struggle’, but the prevailing premise remains that art is clearly the province of genius (or, on occasion, madness). Accepting this premise leads inescapably to the conclusion that while art should be understood or enjoyed or admired by the reader, it most certainly should not be done by the reader. And once that kinship between reader and artist has been denied, art itself becomes a strange foreign object — something to be pointed to and poked at from a safe analytical distance. To the critic, art is a noun.”
I don’t think this passage is intended quite as self-referentially as it ends up sounding, but hey: Art & Fear is a book about art in which art is a verb, and if the authors want to hang a little lantern on that, it’s okay.
“Ahead lies a broad expanse of river, flowing rapidly. The oarsman, only recently learning his skill, nervously maneuvers to avoid the one and only rock breaking the surface downstream, dead center, smooth current to either side. You watch from shore. The oarsman zigs left. Zigs right. And then crashes directly into the rock. When you act out of fear, your fears come true.”
Before I wrap up this ridiculously overly-long essay, I have a few notes about the book as a book.
It must be said: Art & Fear is not particularly well edited. There are words missing here or doubled up there, questionable punctuation, weirdly inconsistent formatting and layout, and POV and tone that wander all over the road like drunkards behind the wheel. It’s a collection of musings and microthemes assembled over a long period by two people who are not, fundamentally, writers.
Also, this book is divided into chapters/sections for…reasons? When I was first typing up my notes I didn’t even write down the chapter headings because they make little sense vis-à-vis the text. I guess they don’t hurt anything…it’s just kind of weird.
And it formally cites almost nothing. There’s a lot of “as Ansel Adams would say…” or “there’s a story told about philosopher George Santayana…” or whatever, without one single citation anywhere in the book. I’ve complained about how other books handle footnotes and endnotes (and celebrated others!), but this one just…doesn’t have them.6 But I think this is okay! Art & Fear isn’t scholarship or journalism, exactly. It’s a tone piece, opinion, advice…kind of thinking aloud on the page.
Obviously I like that: it’s what I do here, too!
“Nominees for Leading Role in a Continuing Artists’ Funk are: (1) you’ve entirely run out of new ideas forever, or (2) you’ve been following a worthless dead end path the whole time. And the winner is: (fortunately) neither.”
Finally, I don’t think of my Bookshelf entries as “book reviews” or any sort of recommendation engine at all. Just me sharing some thoughts. Here, I’m going to make an exception.
If you’re engaged with professional creative endeavor at all — visual, sonic, literary, architectural, industrial, whatever — and especially in a leadership position, just go ahead and pick this one up. You can read it in a sitting.
It is imperfect: you won’t agree with everything it says, you won’t find all of its suggestions helpful, you won’t appreciate everything about the authors’ approach or point of view. It occasionally feels a little old. It is not a finely wrought piece of literature.
But I’d be shocked (shocked, I say!) if you aren’t at least a little struck by something, some observation about the creative process, some nugget that sticks with you like “you can’t have done it until you do it” has with me.
It’s particularly interesting to me that the authors are primarily photographers. Their ability to get to the heart of the artistic and creative process in a way that generalizes so well to other disciplines is remarkable. I feel a certain kindred spirit in the approach: my personal experience is really in managing and leading teams focused on sound and music, but I’ve been so close for so long to teams of visual artists, designers, animators, writers, producers, coders, and so forth that I feel justified in broadening my subject matter to “creative professionals” more generally with Ars Pandemonium. Maybe hubris. Hopefully insight.
I suggested something similar in my essay The Watercooler Conundrum, pointing out specifically that this is true even in a “professional” context. To me, this underpins a great deal of the dynamic on a high-performance creative team.
Yes, criticism and scholarship evolve over time — and for sure some of this doesn’t hold up — but the history content doesn’t leap out as terribly anachronistic, at least not to me.
The book couldn’t know this, of course (given its age!), but I see a direct line between this and the bizarre 2002 insistence by Attorney General John Ashcroft to drape curtains over the statues in the Department of Justice building (there’s nothing remotely scandalous about Spirit of Justice’s aluminum “nudity” unless you’re an absolute perv — or, you know, an authoritarian-adjacent hypocrite — like Ashcroft), and right up through current efforts to ban books and stifle certain aspects of public education.
Actually, I think there is ONE footnote in the whole book, and it’s a funny one. It follows a somewhat snide remark about “-isms” being aesthetic filters. The footnote reads: “Frederick J. Crews is the author of the definitive text on the perils of philosophical tunnel vision. In fact the title to his small volume is itself a classic: The Pooh Perplex -A Freshman Casebook- In Which It is Discovered that the True Meaning of the Pooh Stories is Not as Simple as is Usually Believed, But for Proper Elucidation Requires the Combined Efforts of Several Academicians of Varying Critical Persuasions.” The whole thing is so meta that I had to put it in a footnote, too!