
Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

As in the case of fairs, gallery and museum exhibitions are accompanied by written and verbal statements about the meaning of the works, which I call style scripts.27 Style scripts include press releases, artist statements, catalog text, and informal conversations.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
def. of styles
In the absence of objective or universal criteria for evaluating their work, ambivalence, excitement, and boredom serve as fulcrums for aesthetic judgment.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
Centrifugal and centripetal forces drive the creative cycle as artists toggle between concentrating and evolving their bodies of work.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
Artists rely on specific emotions that arise during the creative process to interpret what is relevant and interesting in the context of their specific bodies of work.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
Even when artists can adequately predict the results of experimentation, they must aesthetically judge these results in a field that lacks consensus as to what constitutes good work.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
The other kind of uncertainty is evaluative.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
Artists can never completely predict the results of experimentation because materials react in ways they do not expect and because they are not fully conscious of their creative decisions before they make them.
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
One kind of uncertainty is material:
Hannah Wohl • Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged
During the creative process, artists must stabilize two kinds of uncertainties in order to choose from infinite possibilities for source material, decide what to do with these materials, and assess the results.