Brian Thomas Clark

Ok, here goes: I realized that the quality I value among the most highly—if not the most hightly—in an artistic collaborator is conviction. A lot of words are thrown around when it comes to creative work: trust, community, "gift" in the Lewis Hyde sense, sincerity, etc. But conviction is different—it's belief in what you are doing, being driven to... See more

Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this... See more

It seems clear that AI art’s biggest utility right now is aspirationalism. The ability to quickly and cheaply generate a vision of the future for Trump supporters. And I’ve written before about how AI art is to modern fascism what futurism was to 20th-century fascism, but the Homeland Security X account posting a Thomas Kinkade painting — and a... See more

Philosophy begins in wonder, and the art of it is to keep this wonder with you. Many questions are worth asking, re-asking, revisiting, rethinking. One must seek Knowledge, but be a little wary of finding it. Perhaps excessive, but one could say the idea of possessing knowledge represents a kind of complacency. This is what Socrates meant: Once you... See more

Trying repeatedly to do something so potentially devastating requires being finely attuned to other people, tapped into your own ability for intimacy. And our culture of extreme individualism and extreme alienation, our culture of loneliness, doesn’t exactly make that easy.

The gift with the highest return: believing in someone before they believe in themselves.

To put it more plainly: As you grow older, you face the interconnected questions of which parts of yourself to preserve, which parts of yourself to evolve, and which parts of yourself to abandon .

I think these are fun questions to work over, because they’re questions without easy answers and, anyway, there’s no opting out of them. You can ignore... See more

But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again,... See more