Read the introduction and a chapter of the book at the link in bio.
#imnotanartist #art #arthistory #sustainability #ecomodels #artist #artistmyth #artworld #artmarket #collectors #arthistorians #curators #power

Here I talk about social class, money, failure, narcissism, Institutions, part-time work, creativity and composting… yes, composting. I sketch out ecologically-inspired models creatives can use to locate themselves in their own milieus and build sustainable, adaptive, meaningful practices.

'I’m Not an Artist' is for aspiring and emerging practitioners whose careers aren’t unfolding as they hoped. It’s for students but also for anyone who wants a clear, jargon-free look at how the art world operates behind the scenes.

This book was born from years of watching smart, gifted students walk away from artmaking, not because they weren’t good enough, but because art schools failed them: drowning them in debt while teaching them how to make art, but not how to live as artists.

After 25 years navigating the art worlds of Europe and the US, I’ve seen how the system really works, why it’s unsustainable, often morally bankrupt, and how creative people thrive only when they truly understand the ecology they’re actually living in.

So what if we gave up the title artist altogether in order to reclaim creativity? That’s exactly the proposition at the heart of my new book, 'I’m Not an Artist' (Bloomsbury).

Romanticized notions of how one becomes an “artist” have long been questioned, so why do we still fetishize them in popular culture, turning a blind eye to the politics of exclusionism that characterize the art world and conforming our creative potential to well-trodden stereotypes?

#art #plants #book #posthumanism #criticalplantstudies #china #peaches

Peach branches placed above a home’s main door were thought to prevent malevolent ghosts from entering. And the sacred wood of peach trees was made into lethal swords that Daoist masters used to kill demons.

From Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (Getty; 2025)

often represented holding a peach, while the white-bearded god of longevity emerges from a peach. These mythical attributes have persisted for millennia in Chinese culture. Peach stones carved in the shape of locks were traditionally worn by children to scare off disease-carrying demons.

in leaves once every thousand years. The fruit takes roughly three thousand years to ripen. Everyone who eats the peaches lives for at least three thousand years and their bodies become weightless and strong to an otherworldly degree. For this reason, members of the Eight Immortals are

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Kandinsky, Wassily
Murnau the Garden II
Oil on cardboard
1910

#art #gardens #kandinsky #abstraction #plants #flowers #painting

Vegetation and flowers dissolve into pulsating swaths of teal, red, pink, and blue. This is not a garden of deliberate cultivation, but one transfigured by uncontainable intensity—an ecstatic vision brimming with vegetal vitality.

Of the actual garden in the Bavarian village of Murnau, located at the foot of the Alps, Kandinsky evokes only faint echoes, the cheerfulness of sunflowers, perhaps, but little else. The topography remains elusive; the slanted horizon is fractured by the intense crimson of distant rooftops.

come to believe that the essence of artistic expression resided in the pure power of color and its capacity to reach deep, articulating what words fail to grasp. "Murnau the Garden II" marks Kandinsky’s transition from figuration to pure abstraction.

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