Austin Kleon

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Cactus surgery

In today’s newsletter, I wrote about cactuses and knowing what to leave in and what to leave out in your work:

This weekend Meg performed surgery on Giuseppe, our crested Mexican fencepost cactus. (Imported from Italy, hence the name — ha!) Giuseppe had sprouted some offshoots that were keeping him from growing.

As you probably know by now, gardening is one of my favorite metaphors for creative work. (See also: proplifting, etc.) Propagation from cuttings is particularly fascinating to me: by severing a branch of a cactus, you can then regrow it as a new plant. (One little detail I find significant: it’s best to let the cuttings sit and dry and callous before you repot them. Time — always a magic ingredient in our work!)

These prickly pear in our front yard, for example, started out as single little pieces transplanted from our friend’s back yard. (I have been meaning to write for a while about how prickly pear really let you see exponential growth in slow motion.)

Thinking about propagation as a metaphor made me think about “relocating your darlings” — the idea that we can cut things out of our work that we love but don’t seem to be working with the piece as a whole. If we plant those cuttings in new soil, we can grow them into a whole new thing.

Read the rest here.

Filed under: gardening

Artists must be allowed to make bad work

Here is a clip of the art critic David Sylvester in 1969 on the BBC show The Visual Scene (the “Playing it Cool” episode) talking about the dangers of artists working too much in the public eye:

Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.

This clip went viral on @davidrisley’s Instagram, obviously speaking to the pressures that many artists feel with the rise of social media.

Viewed in the context of the episode, Sylvester is talking, specifically, about the “professionalization” and “commercialization” of art, and basically the hype machine of the art world:

There is a tendency in our society to be wedded to the new, to be wedded to the excitement of novelty. I think at the present moment that there’s a tendency —  which I think we’ve got from America, and which I think is a bad tendency, to  measure every artist by his last exhibition. “So and so’s no good, look at his last show!” The fact that he had five previous shows, which were very good, doesn’t seem to matter. It gets forgotten too quickly. And somehow the snap judgement on what one has just done, this kind of pressure it puts on is very dangerous, because artists must be allowed to go through bad periods…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtqNZQsnN2A

On a side note: Many people told me this clip was probably one of Sylvester’s interviews with the painter Francis Bacon, specifically, Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait. I watched the whole thing trying to find the clip, with no luck, but I don’t regret it, as the interview is excellent. (John Berger quotes from it in his essay, “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney,” collected in About Looking.) I’m now going to watch Sylvester and Bacon’s 1985 interview together, Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact.)

Filed under: bad art

Professional human loser

While reading Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, I came across this bit from Jeopardy! whiz Ken Jennings’ essay, “My Puny Human Brain,” about getting beat by a supercomputer:

To my surprise, losing to an evil quiz show–playing computer turned out to be a canny career move. Everyone wanted to know What It All Meant, and Watson was a terrible interview, so suddenly I was the one writing think pieces and giving TED Talks. Brad and I can both be found in standard college cognitive-science textbooks now, standing behind blue lecterns looking annoyed. Last year, Watson and I even reunited for a TV commercial. (He was professional as always, but you could cut the on-set tension with a knife.) Like Kasparov before me, I now make a reasonable living as a professional human loser. Have rueful sense of own inevitable obsolescence, will travel.

Emphasis mine.

Paulus Berensohn once said, “There’s something that we lose with contemporary technology. I would like to be the monk that raises his hand and says, ‘Remember. Remember the hand.’”

I’m no monk, but I believe deeply in the head, the heart, and the hands. In a human intelligence rooted in our bodies.

If AI really does “take over,” I would very happy to spend my days as a Professional Human Loser…

The thing that sticks out

Here is a visualization from a syllabus for a writing workshop posted by novelist Luke Geddes. (I found it via Matt Bell, who said it “might be most of what you need to know.”)

I think it speaks for itself, but here’s a batch of quotes to back it up from a previous post of mine, “What to leave in and what to leave out”:

David Mamet, in Three Uses Of The Knife:

I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.

Peter Turchi told me when he’s teaching writing workshops, he’s careful not to try to “fix” a student’s story too quickly:

[W]e have to recognize that the thing that looks most flawed, might, in fact, be the most interesting thing in the work. So we’re not looking for the thing that functions best, because to do that is to only reward the most conventional and most familiar moves the work makes. But to try to recognize the thing that excites us the most, or intrigues us the most, which may be something the writer doesn’t even understand.

(We spoke about this more, and his vision for writing workshops in this interview.)

Finally, from another angle, here’s Jean Cocteau:

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like — then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

I made some poems

Marc Weidenbaum wrote some kind words about my blackout work, which inspired me to take a day and do some “comfort work.”

I wrote about it in the latest newsletter:

Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) Marc was interested in the source material for the poem he shared, and I had to admit to him, “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — I try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.” (Almost every blackout I make is from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times — the ones in this email are all from the August 28, 2022 issue.

Read more here.

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