1. Learn why contemporary, legacy, and historical artists are not the same.
2. Ignore the zillion other artists working right now. Pretend it’s mostly just you.
3. Keep your active friend list down to 2 or 3.
4. Don’t pay more than lunch money for portfolio reviews or career consultations.
5. Learn what event is and put it in every artwork.
6. Don’t trivialize yourself.
7. Think of your entire organism as your instrument. Keep it tuned. Refine it constantly.
8. Read omnivorously.
9. Delete all your social media accounts except Instagram. Then ignore Instagram.
10. Choose an interesting day-job career that pays enough, covers healthcare, uses some art skills, and leaves energy for studio work.
11. Avoid the typical artist travel destinations.
12. Learn when to pause, when to resume, when to stop, and when to start.
14. Think of your art as a separate organism.
15. Make bad artworks at volume. Don’t show them.
16. Don’t be any artist’s fan-child.
17. Remember always: the institution is not your friend.
18. Stop telling the truth all the time.
19. When looking at artworks, even your own, ask yourself why they exist.
20. Keep the eras straight. Warhol is not Contemporary. Contemporary artists can’t be Abstract Expressionists.
21. Don’t retcon today’s culture into past eras. Van Gogh didn’t paint selfies.
22. Remember: selling artworks is unrelated to making artworks.
23. Keep secrets.
24. Pollock’s rage defied a repressed era. Cecily Brown’s noise resonates a cacophonous era. Get it?
25. Warhol comforted viewers with familiar consumer products. Koons comforts viewers with their own reflections. Get it?
26. Some canonical art really sucks.
27. Beuys’s Luftwaffe story is unsubstantiated. Manzoni’s Merde d’Artiste cans contain tomato paste. Basquiat was raised upper-middle-class. Get it?
28. Narcissism sells.
29. You are the authority on art of this moment.
30. A lot of canonical art is just terrible.
31. A workmanly approach creates workmanly artworks.
32. A factory approach creates art-like products.
33. Method replaces artist every time.
34. The impulse that started you making art years ago will guide you through an entire art-making life, if you let it.
35. Don’t day-job too much like your art.
36. Pollock pushed beyond his own limits during his final years. Serra simply repeated himself. Picasso barely showed up. Duchamp gave up and played chess. Get it?
37. Never, ever give it away free. Never hand it over for token payment. Set your price early and never cross that line.
38. Take risks. Art that can’t fail is worthless.
39. 500 years from now Judd boxes will house chickens. Serra’s public art will shelter nomads. Children will keep warm beneath Beuys’s unraveled felt work. Koons’ Popeye will launch a cult. Basquiat paintings will provide sails for fishing boats.
40. If your studio is a haven of relaxation, whatever you’re doing, it isn’t art-making.
41. Duchamp was joking.
42. Some artists have one trick because it’s all they can do. Some range widely because they can do anything. Between these two lies a spectrum.
43. Take something, claim it represents something else, and you’ve made a piece of Conceptual art as valid and impactful as any canonical Conceptual artwork. Yet no institution would ever consider exhibiting it.
44. When everything is art, nothing is art. When everyone’s an artist, no one is an artist.
45. The postmodern artists who are still relevant are no longer postmodern.
46. The catalog for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture contains many artists whose names and work no one remembers a mere 40 years later. Get it?
47. If you chose visual art as a field because anything can be art, there’s no outside authority, no standards, and no way to judge your work negatively, please do something else.
48. Some artworks say interesting things, whether loudly or with a whisper. Some artworks say nothing, whether loudly or with a whisper. Some art viewers hear interesting things and applaud. Some art viewers hear nothing and applaud.
49. When everything means something else, nothing means anything.
50. It’s not a new style or method or format that matters now in visual art. No one sees your style and says, “Hmm, yes, very compelling, relevant, it adds to our understanding of ourselves.” It’s not even the individual artwork. What matters now is the individual viewer’s response to that artwork. Our scope of affect is microscopically granular. One viewer sees the artwork and connects. A few see it and are angry or annoyed. Most don’t see, and/or don’t respond. The responses are specks of dust on a dance floor, quickly swept away. How will you make this work for you?
51. Leave questions.