Small things get big, big things get small

Friday, October 10, 2025

In my letter, “On working bigger (or not),” I shared some notes on scale, reduction, and enlargement, including an old theory I have about the web:

Online, big work gets smaller, while smaller work stays the same or gets bigger.

You can use this to your advantage. For most of my career, I have worked essentially in miniature, with almost every image I create happening in a small sketchbook or a page no bigger than a piece of typing paper.

It occurred to me very early on that if you take a little sketchbook doodle, scan it, and put it up on your blog, you essentially don’t lose anything in the transmission. (Unlike, say, looking at a tiny reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens in an art history textbook or something.)

Show Your Work! turns 10

Thursday, March 14, 2024

It’s the 10th anniversary of this little book. So delighted that it’s still speaking to people. Thanks to everyone who’s read and shared it. (Especially @aliabdaal, who says it changed his life.)

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A post shared by Ali Abdaal (@aliabdaal)

Artists must be allowed to make bad work

Sunday, May 7, 2023

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:

British art critic David Sylvester (he could also be talking about kids) pic.twitter.com/9a376a2Pb2

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) May 4, 2023

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

Seeing the strings attached

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Director Steven Spielberg recently talked about regretting editing the guns out of the 20th anniversary edition of E.T.:

No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through…. I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there.

Film writer Eric Vespe posted a 2011 interview in which the director comes at the subject from a fan:

[Viewers] understand when they see a movie and they suddenly see something that could have been done much better today and could have been corrected in the DVD/Blu-Ray transfer, they really appreciate seeing the strings attached.

If somebody put out George Pal’s War of the Worlds and took the strings off the machines I’d be very upset. When that machine crashes in downtown Hollywood, and you see the strings going from taut to slack, that’s the thing that allows me to both understand this movie is scaring the hell out of me and at the same time this movie is a creation of the human race.

Emphasis mine. (Show your work!)

That bit about the strings the signs of the human hand made me think about the way AI blends images together — you can’t see the seams!

The seams are what is so good to me about collage. The seams show the different origins of the material. They tell me that a human made it.

And to a certain extent it’s true for all the art I like: the imperfections — the seams and the pops and the strokes and the scratches and the dogs barking in the background — they humanize the work for me and bring me closer to it.

My prediction is that AI will — at least in a certain portion of the population, anyways — lead to a hunger for the handmade, for signs that the thing you’re watching/reading/listening to is “a creation of the human race.”

A blog post is a search query to find your people

Sunday, February 19, 2023

when you pin your kind you get your team — A blackout from my book, *Show Your Work!*

I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

He writes:

A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.

So what do you write about to find your people?

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”

This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.