The View – by Ted Orland

Posted by chad on Feb 17, 2012 in Chad | 6 comments

I picked up Orland’s first “Art advice” book, Art and Fear, back in college and have always thought of it as one of the best. It’s clear and concise, it covers nearly everything and is full of wisdom. I was very happy to learn that there was a kind of sequel and The View is more of the same, easily readable and useful advice on the broad topic of how to make it as an artist. I’m not sure how to make a stronger case for the quality of this book then to list some  of the passages that stood out for me.

Chapter 3: Art & Society    -    Artists today work in the face of some very large problems. These are the big ones: Art plays no clear role in our culture. Artists have little direct contact with their audience. Artmaking is indulged, but rarely rewarded.

Chapter 4: The Education of the Artist  -  If a roomful of students all arrived at the identical (and demonstrably correct) answer to a math question, it would be exemplary. But if those same students answered an artistic question by producing a roomful of identical paintings, something would be terribly wrong. Indeed, if the only things that counted were the things you could count, then Haydn would clobber Beethoven 106-9 in the symphony playoffs, and the Museum of Modern Art would hang street banners declaring Whoever Paints the Biggest Picture Wins.

Chapter 8: From Monet to Money  -  The director of one well-established West Coast gallery confided to me that fully three-quarters of her gallery’s sales were accounted for by exactly two categories of art: 1) Masterworks by famous – well, OK, dead – artists; and 2) one particular artist’s small edition color lithograph of really cute little white boats. So there you have it, a ready-made recipe for success: Be dead, or paint little white boats.

Still if the only goal were to attain quick visibility in the art world, the formula (at least on paper) is absurdly simple: devote 10 percent of your time to artmaking, and 90 percent to marketing and self-promotion. But it’s a gambit that works (when it does work) only as long as you keep sprinting down the fame & fortune treadmill – pause for an instant and it’s a straight drop into oblivion. But even though cultivated fame has little substance behind it, that hardly slows the stampede. In our media-dominated culture it’s an open question whether fame is the result of accomplishment, or whether fame – all by itself – is the accomplishment. Today you can be famous for being famous. Ask Paris Hilton.

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In the last chapter: A community of Artists, Orland describes some of the artists groups that he’s been a part of through out his life. He tells a charming story about a group, started in the 70′s that produced newsletters for the various members scattered around the country. That they didn’t have enough money to produce reproductions and so included actual prints. That sans a gallery, a museum or magazine fame an artists group can be -the- destination for your art. Of course I was reading that and thinking how much easier we have it today. This blog, the power available to us to share and promote our work within a group and to a wide audience. It makes me wonder, if in a way, we have it too easy, that because we haven’t had to work so hard to have these opportunities we don’t notice them for what they are and don’t take care with them.

Orland uses the example of the Stradivarious Violins to explain the value that a close community working in a similar direction can have. How a good percentage of all the best violins ever made came from a tiny Italian village , and all made within a few decades can only be explained by a community working towards a particular goal and with quality as a standard. I had started reading this book back in the fall, while I was still dreaming up the idea for AAT, but I think I already had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the final chapter however. It was a bit surreal reading about other artists groups and Orland pinpoints size as an important factor, that everyone in the group needs to have a voice or it turns into the classroom style lecturer and listener format, that consistently adding new members to the mix keeps everyone engaged and interested. One of his groups recently had a group showing as well, something I’d love to see AAT do someday. There’s a goal for us, right there.