Artist. Critic.

I am working my way through my third semester of graduate school.  Pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts.  My advisor, Rachael VanFossen, suggested, after a conversation in which I mightily employed my trusty soapbox, that I begin working on a manifesto.  I took her advice, and began what has turned into a draft for future use.

During the construction of the second half of the essay I have stumbled back across a book I found invaluable the first time I read it.  It's The Vocation of the Artist by Deborah Haynes.  Ms. Haynes, who was kind enough to communicate with me via e-mail and send a copy of another of her books, makes many critically important points in Vocation.  Artists, she says, are responsible for turning a critical eye toward their own and others' artwork.  But, she goes on to say, criticism, isn't necessarily the negative, biting, angry sort of commentary often associated with the word.  It's analysis.  It's exploration, and philosophical pondering.  It's close examination.

Artists are responsible, I believe, for advancing the whole of Art.  For reaching out to the world around them, their audience, their fellow artists, fellow academics and intellectuals, and finding out what is going on in that world.  They are responsible, then, for observing, analyzing, and commenting.  If we care about the world of art, and about the World, really, then we artists are going to pick back up where we seem to have left off, long about the advent of the Superstar Artist in the 1960s, quit trying to turn ourselves into the Kardashians and Hiltons of the creative universe - seeking only notoriety - and instead seek to build on the body of knowledge the artworld offer.  Seek to better our minds, our techniques, our practices.  Seek to get our heads out of the Reality toilet bowl and into the world of thought, analysis, critical commentary.

Hm.  Looks like I've got some work to do.  Ok -- putting away the soap box now.