Art as a Verb

The Five-Pointed Star of Why

The other day I was on the phone with my friend Neale James and we were talking about a recent episode of his podcast The Photowalk, on which he was talking to our mutual friend Sean Tucker about creativity. “I invite you,” Neale begins the episode, “to imagine a five-pointed star. Now on each point of the star, I’d like you to think of a word that’s important to you in terms of creativity or your creativity. Each is a kind of cornerstone of the why and even how you create as of today.” As an aside, if you’re not listening to Neale’s show, you really should give it a try. Neale is a terrific host and his episodes are masterclasses in audio production and atmosphere. Anyway, as we were talking about his episode with Sean, he asked what the points on my creative star might be. On one hand, “why do you create?” is a deceptively simple question that many of us spend inordinate amounts of time wrestling with — at least I do. I think that Neale’s clever addition “as of today” gives us a little wiggle room and leaves the possibility open that these five terms don’t have to define our making for all eternity, but rather just for now. It’s one of the reasons that I love this as an exercise. While the creative process itself is important, I think that checking in with ourselves around why we create is equally valuable — maybe even more so because it allows us to square what we’re making against why we’re making it.

QUESTIONS
What are some of the points on your creative star?

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at [email protected].

LINKS
My archive of paintings
Dorothy Simpson Krause
inkAID
Father Bill Moore
Shepard Fairey

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MUSIC
Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Connection, Collaboration, and Creative Maturity

If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you probably know I’m a big Nine Inch Nails fan and have been since 1990 when I saw them open up for Peter Murphy. The other day, I was watching a terrific video with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross breaking down some of their most iconic tracks. One of the more fascinating aspects of the video was how much Trent talks about process and how important the “feel” of the music was and still is. “When we write music,” Trent says, “it’s coming from a place where its main intent is to have you feel a certain way. It’s not coming from a love of melody and a joy of intricate chord progressions or technical wizardry.”

I love this because he’s not just chasing easy likes or trying to impress the audience. Instead he’s focusing on how the work serves the overall project and on the relationship between the work and the audience. It’s not a “look at me” type of thing, like a gratuitous guitar solo or a vocalist who takes every opportunity to sing an unnecessary run. That’s not the point, which I think speaks to a level of creative maturity that’s important to cultivate as any kind of artist.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at [email protected].

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Email: [email protected]

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Can a Podcast Change Your Life?

Last week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures. If you’re a longtime listener, you may think you’ve heard this before, and you’re right, you have. But this time it’s different. I’ll get to why in a minute, but first I need to back up.

In 2008, I was teaching Photoshop at Tri-Community Photo in Covina, California. One of the other instructors and I started doing photo walks with some of the students on the weekends. As they got more popular, we put up a simple web page called Faded & Blurred that had details about the upcoming walks. It pretty quickly evolved into a full-blown site, complete with a blog, spotlights on some of our favorite photographers, and a podcast called Q&A@F&B, which was a series of long-form conversations with photographers who were willing to sit down with me for an hour and talk about their work. In addition to getting to talk with photographers like John Keatley, David duChemin, and Ibarionex Perello, I also spoke with Bill Wadman for the first time. Bill and I hit it off straight away, and in 2012, when he was thinking about doing a weekly photography podcast, he started auditioning potential co-hosts. He reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested. I said sure, and my audition ended up being the first episode of OTP. For the next 6 years and 325 episodes, my Tuesday mornings were spent recording the show, with me in Rancho Cucamonga, California—at least to start—and Bill in Brooklyn, New York.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at [email protected].

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Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: [email protected]

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Art as a Verb

The artist Richard Serra died recently, and I know he’s considered a big deal in the art world, but honestly I’ve never really gotten what all the hype is about. I suppose I can appreciate the scale and the forms of some of the work in the same way that I can appreciate the architecture of Frank Gehry, but overall, it just never really grabbed me. Anyway, one of the posts that came up in my feed contained a quote by him that goes:

“Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.”

LINKS
Conversation with an Artist: Richard Serra
Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)
Richard Serra on his Drawing (2011)

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at [email protected].

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Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: [email protected]

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Can AI and Artists Coexist?

After recording last week’s episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video that’s both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called “AI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.” The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work. The dataset was initially intended for research but has since been made available commercially and has been used to train AI models, including MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. While it does contain images from the public domain, it also contains millions of copyrighted images, as well as explicit content. As they say in the video, no consent was obtained, nor were artists given the opportunity to opt in or opt out—and this is really at the core of why so many artists whose work has been stolen are so upset.

LINKS
Juxtapoz article
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz
AI algorithms
Discussion on Threads
Gagosian

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at [email protected].

CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
Email: [email protected]

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Subscribe to Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris in your favorite podcast app. You can also subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris