A few weeks ago I gave a talk on Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like An Artist at The Economist’s Human Potential summit in New York City. They had an awesome tech staff, so we even managed to weave some of my live drawings from the conference into the talk. Enjoy!
The Economist had me out to their Ideas Economy “Human Potential” conference in New York last week. I gave a talk on Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like An Artist, but I also did some drawings on my iPad during the other talks, and posted them to Twitter as I drew. (Still getting used to drawing live on the iPad — not sure I love it, but I thought I’d experiment.) I’ve cleaned them up a little and collected them here.
I had the pleasure of leading a couple of blackout poetry workshops at the Dallas Museum of Art last weekend. It’s still a huge thrill for me to see a whole room full of people of all ages and backgrounds making art in the same space. I’ve found that folks really don’t need much instruction—they just need materials, some space, some time, and permission to play.
On Saturday, I led an all-teen workshop of 15 students. We worked on poems, and then we went into the galleries to soak up some inspiration. I showed them some pieces I liked and talked about how I look at art in museums and how I look at art in general. One thing I said to them is that it’s one thing to feel something about a piece of art, it’s another thing completely to be able to express it in words. Sometimes you can’t explain why you like a piece, and that’s okay.
I carried an iPad around with me, and as we were looking at the work, I’d pull up a few of my blackout poems to talk about the work in context. At a Mondrian, I talked about color and grids. In sculpture, we talked about subtraction. Etc.
In the Reves collection, which displays the Reves’ collection as it was originally displayed at their villa, I talked about my experiences with 20×200 and collecting art, and how art doesn’t just hang in a museum—it’s something you live with in your everyday life.
Thanks to all the great people at the Dallas Museum of Art for having me. I love teaching, and I love talking about art, so this was a real treat.
So cool: ACM Chicago has commissioned composers and musicians to set my poems to music.
UPDATE: Here’s a writeup from the The Columbia Chronicle.
TEDxPennQuarter – Austin Kleon – Reinventing Poetry
Photo by Flickr user sexyfitsum
The TEDxPennQuarter folks asked me to give a 10-minute talk around the theme of “reinventing,” with the (not-at-all-lofty!) title, “Reinventing Poetry.”
It started out like almost everything I do: with doodling.
Here are doodles from my phone call with Kes Sampanthar, the organizer of the event:
Kes encouraged me to really think about my personal story and focus on the question, “What does it mean to be an artist today?” (No pressure!)
So I scrapped a lot of the ideas I had, and started thinking about story and process. The meat of the talk really started with my notes on this “Publishing 3.0” talk given by Richard Nash:
I used the flowchart above as a starting point for all of my slides. (See them on Flickr):
This wasn’t the best presentation I’ve ever given, but the process of sorting through all these ideas turned out to be way more valuable to me than a perfect performance. And as they say, why do anything if you can’t learn something from it?
Thanks to Kes and the TEDxPennQuarter folks, and thanks to my friends for showing me a good time in DC!
See also: my visual notes from the rest of the TEDxPennQuarter talks
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