what is art

“Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.

It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.

Art is not in the ...eye of the... See more

In fact, if I sense that an artist is creating, saying or doing things just to win public approval, or to yield to the demands of the market, well, that’s when I tend to turn away.

One of my favorite understandings is that we teach from the radiance of our own discovery. When I can open to the silence and stillness that is here, then words and ideas arise that express that discovery....We teach what is alive for us, and that aliveness is the transmission.

If your intention is to ‘make art’, then maybe you’ll get a couple of good paintings. You may even get a show or two.

But I think of it this way: I don’t make art. I make things . Framing it like that keeps what I’m doing from becoming precious. And that’s a good thing, because to be precious is to be timid—and that’s bad. Creativity requires attent

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But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more