[How should artists behave? How should we discuss art, build venues to show it in, tell people about it, try and support artists? There is no single answer: each situation demands a different solution. Perhaps, as we are hit daily with dire economic news, what is needed is to remain sensitive to the details, those small elements in the art world that cumulatively exert their own pressures on the ways in which people behave or relate to the making of art. As Raban writes, ‘we are necessarily dependent on surfaces and appearances a great deal of the time, and […] it is to surfaces that we must learn to attend with greater sympathy and seriousness.’18 It depends on whether we wish, one day, to find ourselves contentedly walking to dinner each evening ‘smartly dressed, well-groomed, relaxed, friendly, polite and in complete control’.]
This Frieze piece, “A Serious Business: What does it mean to be a professional artist?” by Dan Fox, is long, academic, and often confusing. And very worth reading.
