After the long post of yesterday, I made a change here. The downloading of my brain space into this e-space is now under my name, not “works of man”.
While it’s highly improbable anyone outside of my particular household will even notice or care, it give me a bit of nausea. Which is good. Anecdotal reason why:
When I first started selling my work at art shows, it was terrible. I had been selling other people’s work for years, but selling my own was utterly different. For a very long time, around the time of the show, I would start having a reoccurring dream. The dream involved me being at a show, behind my cases, as always. Inside the cases were my entrails.
You can’t get too much more direct than that. My guts were out there in front of everyone.
If I’m nauseous, it means I’m putting things out there a little more. “Works of Man” can be easy to hide behind. There’s so damn much more to do, and I need to break all of my own patterns, boundaries, escape the boxes I’ve created for myself. It’s time to step out from the cases.
What’s humorous, is that it would likely be intelligent to continue on as-is. Build the business. Yet it’s not a business I want to build. It’s artwork. As a professional (dear lord what does that mean?) person who makes their living selling artwork, it is an uneasy alliance of business and art; it has to be. I need the balance to shift, though.
On a vaguely related note… I’m wondering how odd it would be if a piece of sculpture I made could double as an FM radio… or music from Pandora… It could cross the line into tacky, or be a little bit useful. Should one have content coming from a piece of artwork that is unrelated to the artwork? Or would creating/allowing that possibility therefore make it an integral part of the work? It’s always interesting how a useful object is often considered diminished as a piece of art/art object.
Have to study that more. But I think I’ll do it anyway. I’ll write more about that later, even if only notes for myself, here.
