Piri Halasz, former art critic for Time and longtime author (since 2010!) of the blog From the Mayor’s Doorstep, has weighed Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard and found it wonderful. Money quote:
This is strong medicine if you go for the “outrageous” in contemporary art – but should be welcome to all younger artists trying to make beautiful pictures, whether they are abstractionists or representational painters.
Artist and critic Elizabeth Johnson has reviewed the book for Volume IV, Issue #2 of Root Quarterly, a free-thinking, print-only journal published out of Philadelphia by the redoubtable Heather Shayne Blakeslee. Elizabeth says that Aphorisms for Artists “administers swift medicine for the demoralized and temporarily defeated.”
Strong, swift medicine: great minds think alike.
You need a dose, or know someone who does, no doubt. So for the next 72 hours you can use the discount code PIRI for 10% off the title in the Dissident Muse store.
Want to know more? Regard the site for the book. Notice the endorsement from Peter Bradley, who was the subject of a delightful profile in the New York Times last summer. That show at De Luxe he mentions? Darby was in it.
"Art is too popular." The art game certainly is, the art front, the art pretext. Art as such not so much.