No expert, no guru

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Call me an “expert,” and I will correct you. Call me a “guru,” and I might throw up on you.

Re: “expert”: My books are the by-products of the process of trying to figure out how to be a writer and an artist. When I write, when I publish, when I speak, it is in the spirit of being a fellow student. I am simply sharing the things that I am learning. I not only do not consider myself an expert, being an expert seems unbelievably boring to me. Becoming an expert, to me, seems like a kind of spiritual death. A kind of creative petrification. (As my friend Mike Monteiro recently put it, “the secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”)

Re: “guru”: What reasonable human being would actually want to be a guru? (Again: answers are boring. Questions are interesting.) The people in American culture who position themselves as gurus seem to all have either what the comedian Bill Hicks called “a fevered ego,” or they seem to have some extreme character deficiency. More than that, from what I’ve seen, the more you’re considered a “guru,” the harder it is to tell what it is that you actually do. (My nightmare is becoming someone who talks about making art more than actually making art.)

On top of all that, I am starting to feel that the best teacher is the one who refuses you as a student. I’ll end with this parable from John Cage’s Silence:

Warm-ups, test prints, and selling your by-products

Friday, November 10, 2017

While visiting our stunning new library, I popped down to the second floor gallery space to see collage artist Lance Letscher’s Books exhibit. It’s an interesting show because all of the pieces started as studies, or warm-ups: Letscher begins his day in the studio by collaging and experimenting on a book. Sometimes he’ll incorporate what he comes up with into a larger or more involved piece, but sometimes the book itself becomes a finished piece. (To learn more about his process, check out the new documentary, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher.) These aren’t your typical Letscher works. They’re rougher, more miniature. They’re beautiful in a more intimate way, like looking inside a Van Gogh sketchbook or listening to a Prince demo.

I love process-based shows like this, and I was reminded a little bit of “Test Me,” an exhibit by Chris Maddux on display at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s Image Lab, the interdisciplinary work space run by Lynda Barry.

Of course, I wrote a whole book about sharing your process and showing your work, but this is a very particular kind of move, which is akin to what Jason Fried calls selling your by-products: Taking stuff lying around the studio that you’d usually keep in a box or throw out, and re-framing it and presenting it as a finished piece. Turning process into product. (Fried talks more about selling your by-products in the book Rework and on the Rework podcast.)

Lynda does this herself when she sells off her watercolored calligraphic manuscript pages or her morning pages on eBay:

And the folks at Aesthetic Apparatus do this with their test prints: one-of-a-kind artworks made by layering elements from different screenprinting projects they’re working on:

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS MARTHA STEWART

Saturday, July 11, 2009

the chef's business model

In my life, the two women I’ve spent the most time around are my mom and my wife.

They both love to cook. They both own sewing machines.

They both love Martha Stewart.

They love Martha Stewart because they’ve learned from her. They trust her. They buy her books and her products because they feel loyal to her.

They love Martha Stewart kind of like I love Lynda Barry.

* * *

d.i.y. lynda

A year ago I was sitting in a craft store here in Austin. I sat and doodled and ate cupcakes and watched my wife and all these women crafting, teaching each other, helping each other. There was such a sense of inclusiveness. It was as if everyone was saying to each other, “Yes! You can do this! We can do this! Join the club!”

Not long after that, I was watching a profile of Rachel Ray on TV. The folks who knew Rachel seemed to suggest that her success was not necessarily attributed to her abilities as a cook, but rather to her attitude and energy she projected to her viewers. The number one thing she was giving them was encouragement. She wasn’t just teaching them, she was saying, “You can do this!”

I started surfing some of the craft blogs my wife loves to read. It was a total revelation: by sharing and teaching, these women gained readers and loyal fans, and then sold their wares on Etsy and in books to those loyal fans.

And I realized: if artists want to learn a good business model, they should look to the craft community.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. Jason Fried, the founder of the software company 37 Signals (they have a terrific blog), when he gives a talk, he often claims that chefs are the best business entrepreneurs, because they know that sharing leads to more sales. He suggests that businesses emulate famous chefs. My friend Tim Walker summarized this bit in his notes on Fried’s 2008 SXSW session:

Fried notes that the famous big-name chefs (Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, et al.) SHARE a lot. Here are these big experts who are authorities in their field, and yet they’re sharing everything they know. Along the way they collect money from willing customers/users who buy their cookbooks, eat at their restaurants, buy their sauces at the grocery store, etc. Fried says you should figure out what it is YOU do that you can share with everybody else.

(I saw the same idea pop up in my friend Mike Rohde‘s sketchnotes of a Fried talk.)

What Fried said in a recent talk was: Figure out your what’s cooking show. Figure out what’s your cookbook.

Figure out how to be your own Martha Stewart!