Quote
This stuff is hard to talk about, in large part because artistic choices are often indistinguishable from commercial ones. … The best work is often created in conversation with audiences, not by an artist talking to himself or herself in a windowless room. All art is compromise, too, because we’re working with flawed materials and trying to speak the angels’ secrets in the language of humans.
At io9, a fascinating discussion of what it means to “sell out” and why the term itself is fraught.
As Steven Pressfield put it, “To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.”
As Lynda Barry keenly observed, the arts should be “not this thing that is going to get you somewhere, in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable but fascinating.”
Ultimately, David Foster Wallace nailed it in his now-legendary Kenyon College commencement address: “Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.”
Pair with history’s greatest definitions of art.
(via explore-blog)
(Source: , via explore-blog)
