I was asked to talk about art and life, with Emily Tolman. The conversation has been published on Spotify and YouTube.
From the show notes: “Meet Christian Bazant-Hegemark, a painter, game developer, lecturer and more. On this episode of TIP, we talk about some of the flaws of art school. What it teaches us and how that differs from what we actually need to be taught in order to navigate the art world. We talk about schedules, being your own manager, networking and much more. Stick till the end to get some TIPs for artists!“
An excerpt from around 29:00: “I’m not sure whether I can think of a ‘biggest’ frustration (about the art market) right away — but I think maybe one challenge is that .. people start making art for very idealistic or maybe also egoistic reasons. It’s about expressing yourself, learning a complex language or craft; I don’t think that many people start making art because they want to make money.
So then you develop your competencies and you get better at what you do — and it often feels very linear: you get better you get better. And you also understand more about art history, because you also dive into it, you want to understand the system that you are in; and then you understand that what you do cannot so easily be a linear story, because others pursue entirely different stories or aesthetics or contexts.
And so already this shows each of us who make art, that this can be a very complex and long journey. And none of this is related to economic aspects. It’s really just this very beautiful, or maybe very overwhelming, approach to living a life.
And then, all of a sudden, this doesn’t work. Because of course you need some means to live a life, economically. I don’t know why the ideal very often is to make art full time, because that would mean.. already from the word, it sounds like a full time job; but of course in a full time employment situation you automatically get money — the only thing you need to do is to show up, and not mess things up. And with art, you can show up, and make amazing work, and you don’t get a single Euro or Dollar or anything. What does this mean?“
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