Austin Kleon

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Declare it art

I walked past this handicapped spot yesterday and thought of the “Make it art” assignment from Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing:

Think then of some regular walk or drive or ride you experience often, or even that you’re experiencing for the first time. Imagine yourself a curator. Decide what, among the things you notice, you might declare public works of art.

Perhaps a disheveled pylon marking a street flaw that ought to have been fixed by now. Maybe a post that seems to be a lingering remnant of an otherwise departed fence. Possibly even a child with a piercing stare.

Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive.

Art is everywhere, if you say so.

(More in his newsletter.)

Related: “Borrow a kid.”

UPDATE: Alan Jacobs has pointed me to this image from Sarah Hendren’s The Accesible Icon Project:

You are fine without advice and suggestions

photo by openblackboard

I’ve been posting collages with a new technique and Instagram commenters keep asking me how I do them.

A few have been puzzled or even perturbed by my recent “Don’t Ask,” “Don’t Tell,” “No teaching” policy.

“Aren’t you all about sharing?”

Well, yes, I am all about sharing, which is why I posted the work in the first place.

But no, I don’t want to instruct step-by-step how the collages are done, because:

1) I’m still exploring the technique myself and I don’t want to codify it or make any rules or make it boring

2) I am certain that if curious commenters sat down and tried to approximate my technique with their own tools and materials, they would come up with something of their own.

What I really want is to rewrite this wonderful sign in an adventure playground on Governor’s Island called “The Yard.” It reads, “Your children are fine without advice and suggestions.”

I might rewrite it for adults:

YOU ARE FINE WITHOUT ADVICE AND SUGGESTIONS. 

START PLAYING.

Rubbing the right way

I had the rare free morning on tour in Chicago yesterday. It was cold and a little gloomy but it wasn’t raining. Good walking weather. The city was really rubbing me the right way. (So I rubbed it back.)

Lake Michigan was a perfect emerald green. I thought of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who made her home here, and her “Plan Be”: “existing only in the present.”

And I thought of the photo hanging in the Chicago Public Library of Kurt Vonnegut holding his library card.

To be or not to be

I bought so many Beto signs for our yard I thought I’d cut one up into a campaign slogan that more accurately reflects the dire state of our country.

Someone suggested if I made a bunch and put them next to each other they’d still work as Beto signs:

Stoneworks

There are stone monuments scattered throughout my neighborhood — fancy signs announcing the parks, etc. I find them sort of hilarious — they’re so serious, and they look like big tombstones. (They had to cost a fortune!) I like to go around and take pictures of them and then make a game of cutting them up so they announce other things. The only rules are that I never add, only subtract, and I try to make the edits as simple as possible.

(For this one I cheated just a bit and rubbed out letters with the clone stamp in Photoshop.)

Filed under: de-signs

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