Søren Kierkegaard Gets Unvexed

I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life’s mean pettinesses. 

Only when I write do I feel well. Then I forget all of life’s vexations, all its sufferings, then I am wrapped in though and am happy. If I stop for a few days, right away I become ill, overwhelmed and troubled; my head feels heavy and burdened.

Go Hard for You

No one needs your art. 
Imagine if Harry Potter didn’t exist. Pottermania—or Twi-hards, Gleeks, Trekkies, whatever—would’ve just flowed somewhere else—like water. 

But you need your art. 
If you don’t need it, it’ll be the worst thing anyone has seen—even to you. You need to need it, hunger for it. 

What’re you passionate about? 
Turn that passion toward yourself. This is the formula for better work. Just make better work—only strive for better, not perfection.

As Dita Von Teese famously said: You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches.
Let them hate your peaches, but whatever you do, don’t hate your own peaches. Load them with passion and work them over and over. Make sure your fingerprints are all over them.

Start now. Or first thing tomorrow.

Sit Down and Shout Into the Machine

Your Morning Would

I write when I’m inspired—
and I see to it I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

Peter DeVries

Surprise Yourself with One

Hate Warhol: Love War-Haul

You know what? F**k Andy Warhol. I’m tired of those crappy silkscreens of celebrities. I’m tired of him getting to diamond-encrust his a-hole for purloining someone else’s graphic design (Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, Campbell’s Soup cans, etc.), screening copies of them, and selling them for millions (eventually). His great innovation was doing Marcel Duchamp’s schtick for household products.

So what? Well, now we have to live with that. For the last 60 years galleries have been loaded with pop cultural (among others) appropriations by unimaginative come-latelys. 

Enough is enough. The problem with pushing boundaries is, that once pushed, they rarely go back again. It can be good – Little Richard – and very bad – the petulant and rude, profane, ignorant, rantings of the current POTUS.

Despite my Warhol fatigue, he did get one thing right, however: The working process. He was disciplined. In The Art of War he came back with plunder—i.e. work. He worked hard. And though much of his artistic life, I’d argue, was about pandering for big-ticket sales, it wasn’t always that way. Early in his career he was a brilliant illustrator; later, an ingenious conceptualist. But like all heroes, he, at last, became a bore. But then it was his right and duty as an artist.

Make it yours too.