Menu

Searching for my niche

Everybody who talks about marketing is pointing out to all of us that we need to double down and find our niche. Bet I bet a lot of us struggle with the actual application of these wise words into doable, actionable steps. What exactly are we searching for? And where is this magical crevice where all the worlds money is being kept hidden so well, that every guru we find online can tell us about it and we’re still searching for El Dorado? Because it’s not that we don’t know what a niche looks like – I’ve seen plenty of holes…

Preberi celotno objavo

If only I had the right tool for the job!

Ed Ruscha only needed a Xerox copier and his film camera to make his famous artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Not because the book wouldn’t have looked better as a C print on acid free archive-grade paper, but because that’s what he had available to make his book with the resources he had on hand. Today we can buy an inkjet printer with the capacity to print beautiful colour photographs and images fro about 200€, and that’s if we want a really good machine with a low print-per-page cost, Wi-Fi connection and a flatbed scanner. The cheap ones go for about 40€…

Preberi celotno objavo

Balancing act

We usually juggle between two juxtaposed realities; on one side is the “day job” or the job we took to found our living expenses and our real work, that lives on the other side of the equation — our creative production, the profession that we pursue everyday in the hopes of eventually being able to live off only our creative work in the future. And the problem is exactly the notion of in-the-future. When will that dream actually become reality? I find that every time I change my day job I don’t just change what I do for 30-40 hours a…

Preberi celotno objavo

Applying to open calls or begging for a chance?

I spend at least one day a week going through new Open Calls on the web and filling out their applications. As where I come from, the art market isn’t particularly strong (one could say barely moving) my success in applying to grants, open calls and residencies is most of my bread and butter. But I find it leaves me in a weird place – I don’t know if I am asking or begging. Now I know it has a lot to do with the way we ask and the language we use as well as the applications we chose…

Preberi celotno objavo

Hierarchy in a nonhierarchical world

Artists have always had a tendency to stay outside of games played inside the system. Watching, interpreting, searching for better alternatives to what is being offered by the coach to all the players of the teams. Now, we do get involved with politics, economics and culture, but usually such involvement happen on our own terms. Seeing how most games are played by rules that were established long before any current player was even born, be it law, legislation or any other social game we play as people, usually the way to play along is to learn the rules, at least…

Preberi celotno objavo

Everybody’s an artist

In Paolo Sorrentino’s This must be the place, when Cheyenne (played by Shean Penn) is talking with a man in a bar somewhere in New Mexico, the man tells him he makes tattoos for a living, to which he ads that he doesn’t view it as work but really as art. Cheyenne replies with a question: that if he had noticed that nobody works anymore, nowadays everybody’s an artist. Some do see more than others, even though looking in the same direction but it’s not so much being an artist — everyone is an artist, not by choice, but by…

Preberi celotno objavo

It’s OK, he’s an artist!

I don’t count anymore how many times I’ve had the pleasure of being part of a conversation about how we artists have a get-out-of-jail card when it comes to fitting in with the social norms of behaviour. Be it drinking, smoking or taking drugs, misbehaviour or just wearing fancy colourful hats – whatever you do as an artist, well, it’s OK, because you’re just expressing your creativity or boosting it, or maybe just squandering it. With skating, you have people who buy the appropriate Etnies shoes and a nice Burton skateboard and  just hang out at the skatepark not really…

Preberi celotno objavo

Is art in vogue?

Fashion week opened in my town yesterday and all of us attending received a warm greeting, complementary drinks and a wonderful spectacle with a bit of overblown bass. Everybody who is anybody in fashion seemed to be attending, mingling and throwing critical glances on this year’s collections. And I kept wandering about visual arts and the tribal gatherings that we do in galleries and museums. We have a bunch of things in common with the couture crowd; one big event that everybody looks forward to for the whole year, many smaller ones where the little dominance battles of who’s creations…

Preberi celotno objavo