island shaman figure
Now, I do like the marketplace. Selling artwork is enormously gratifying. But I haven’t yet figured out the balance between pure art (making things that one feels driven to make, regardless of whether they interest anyone else), and commercial art (making things in response to marketplace demand.)
This is a boringly typical dilemma, faced by anyone who likes to make art. I’ve bounced back and forth in my variegated art career, producing some purely commercial work (custom-designed business cards, signs, drawings of people’s houses) and some purely personal (oil paintings, abstract raku clay vessels, porcelain mosaics). I have a little bit of skill in WAY too many media, and the result is confusion. The curse of the dilettante.
There are definitely artists who succeed splendidly in both arenas: by pursuing their own strong vision, they create unique works of art which have natural charisma in the marketplace. I hope to be one of those artists after this studio-building, sorting-out phase.
My Forest Folk arose from a lifelong sense of kinship with trees, and also from ancient myths of green man, wood wife, and horned god. There was never anything cute about these archetypes. They are wild and fierce and undomesticated, even dangerous. Yet, the Forest Folk figures I created had become disturbingly quaint and my customers were using words like “adorable” and “charming”.
So, I stopped making them. I have to figure out how to bring forth the original raw archetype which moved me in the first place before I can begin again.
Storytelling totally wins!
Check out the Significant Objects Project! During the space of 4 months or so, these researchers listed 100 objects on eBay, with a total value of about $128. The objects were just doodads from garage sales, just odds and ends. The researchers drafted some writers to make stories to go along with the objects, and each object was then listed for sale on eBay with its fictional story in place of a description. This was not done in such a way as to mislead the buyer; the author’s byline was at the end of the description, and the stories were very clearly fiction. The profits from each object were given to the writer who wrote the story. Over the course of the 4 months, the initial $128. worth of objects were sold on eBay for over $3000!!!
Below is the story, by Jonathan Lethem, which went with the Missouri shotglass, pictured above. (It was bought at a thrift store for $1 and sold on eBay for $76. Click here to see the eBay listing.)
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Listen, friend, forget about the bartender, you could wait all day in this dive, we might as well be invisible over here, I kid you not. Here, let me pour you a drink. No, really, I insist, it’s on me. I brought my own. Just swab out the dust and fingerprints with my shirttails, good as new. Love the way it claps down on the bar, gets your glands salivating, doesn’t it?
No, after you, I insist. My pleasure.
See that freaky little bird? That’s the state bird, my friend. The Missouri Hunt-and-Pecker. Never heard of ’em? Well, then I guess you’ve never been to Missouri, have you? Maybe passed through, didn’t get out of the car. Or changed planes in the airport, or went up in the Arch once, just to say you’d done it. But that’s not Missouri to me. St. Louis is the gateway, sure, but you want to know Missouri you need to drive a few hours into the corn, you want to visit St. Joseph, up through Maryville — skirt the Iowa border, though Iowa’s a sore point from where I sit. You need to get lost in Missouri or you never really were there in the first place. Even then you won’t be likely to meet the Hunt-and-Pecker unless you circulate a manuscript or two.
Manuscript, you heard me right. See, very few know it, because we keep it to ourselves, but Missouri is sick and silly with apprentice fictioneers, the whole state’s like one vast harrowed and furrowed MFA workshop. Why do you think the license plates call it The Show-Don’t-Tell State?
Yeah, sure, Iowa. We’re not promiscuous like them. Rather sit on a manuscript for a hundred years than publish before we’re ready. And when you really contemplate the motto’s implications… show, don’t tell… well, get me here, we’ve taken it to heart. By the time a roving Missouri critique outfit has detasseled your kernels, you better believe me you’ll have second thoughts about advancing into the marketplace. More likely cancel your subscription to Poets & Writers, renew your vows to craft. Scene, setting, voice. Look at that fugging bartender, he’d serve a wood duck in a halter top before he so much as glanced at us.
You like that? Here’s another. Go ahead, you know you want to.
Or shut up entirely, always an option. That’s the ultimate endpoint, you know. Don’t write a word, just be a writer. We’re more than a little stoical out here on the plain, son. Write more? Write less. I strive to write less every day, some day I’ll get there. Not-telling isn’t as easy as it appears.
Lookit ’im there, cool as a flippin’ cucumber, straddling the state like nobody’s business. Crazy little red-tailed devil knows more than he’s saying too, can’t you tell? Love the way he flushes amber, then goes all transparent again. Strive to be like a windowpane, not a mirror, that’s how he makes his way through the world.
All right, I’m out of here. Here you go, you bastard! Keep the change! See, I always leave that sonuvabitch a tip — one red cent. Honest Abe, another fellow from the heartland who knew exactly when to shut up. Keep it real, friend.
written by Jonathan Lethem