Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is considered art history’s foundational text.

Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation.

You have to make a lot of work, she said, because 85 percent of what artists make is junk.

How do you tell what art is “interesting”? It looks like art. What is art? Art is what’s in galleries. Now you know.

In The Art World, illustration is inferior to art on account of serving an end that is not art. Illustration serves subject matter,

or

Pentimento refers to traces of original drawing that the artist has erased.

GALLERY REPRESENTATION, I quickly learned, is the main criterion for who counts as An Artist.

There’s a wonderful freedom in not having to prove anything.