Find your own artists
Why you shouldn't let society tell you who to put on a pedestal.
I spent the first 20 years of my life thinking that I didn’t really like art.Apart from music. Everyone loves music. Sitting through art classes in high school I never felt that anything we were looking at really spoke to me. I just found it all so boring.
I mean there were pieces I saw in museums I kinda liked, but seeing how my wife was looking at the paintings on the wall I always felt that I was missing something. Something that she could see or feel that I couldn’t.
In 2020, I started working with industrial designers to design the enclosure for the weather stations we were developing at our startup
The 3D renders for our weather stations that we designed in 2021.. In the process, I read Don Norman’s book, and got to know the works of Dieter Rams and other industrial engineers and designers. For the first time I felt that what I saw on the computer screen and in the images and books actually spoke to me.
At that time I still didn’t consider them “art” though… this was industrial design and product development. ‘How could that be the same thing as the impressionist paintings that we studied in school?’ - I thought.
But it all changed one night when I stumbled on a TED talk by Tom Sachs.
I had to stop the talk after the first 3 minutes, and start searching for his work immediately. I spent hours browsing his archive, finding endless paintings, sculptures, objects, furniture and electronics that moved me.
I immediately felt that the person who made these is very handy and fixes things, is opposed to consumerism and has a bit of an edge to him. It all had the feeling of a person making garage tools for himself. The feel of makeshift art. The feeling of utilizing whatever you have at hand.
If art is a medium for transferring emotions from the artist to the consumer of that art, then here it succeeded for me. I didn’t need to look at the description texts, I didn’t need to know the life story of the artist, and I didn’t need a 45 minute lecture from an underpaid liberal arts teacher to tell me why I should care about this work.
I just immediately got it.
And yet, this guy was a museum artist. His work was in the Guggenheim. It was in billionaires’ private collections.
So this was art! Art that I - for the first time - understood and could associate with. This was my type of art! These were my people!
So it turns out, I just hadn’t found MY artists before.
“A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”Most often attributed to Louis Nizer and his 1948 book Between You and Me
Tom Sachs is an artist. But so is Jeff Jones. So is Van Neistat. So is Cole Schafer. And so are Bill Stumpf, Dieter Rams, Marc Newson, Frank Lloyd Wright and all the other amazing industrial designers, architects, writers, poets, painters, photographers.
And as a matter of fact, so is my friend Marci, who makes amazing handmade fly-fishing and hiking gear. He is an artist!
Everybody who puts their hands, brain and heart into the process is.
As it turns out Diderot would agree. In his 35 volume Encyclopédie - written between 1751 and 1772 - he uses “Art” to mean “craft” or “technology”.
We humans revere our artists. We put them on a pedestal. We look up to them.
But I feel there is this pressure by our school system and our media that pushes people to feel they have to like the same thing. That the powers that be decide what art is and what you should like.
Well fuck that.
Don’t let society tell you who you should put on the pedestal.
Follow your curiosity to find the work and the people that move you. That make you feel something.
And if you haven’t found them yet; don’t worry. You will.
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