Product Information
Artists are everywhere, from celebrities showing at MoMA to locals hoping for a spot on a cafe wall. They are photographed at gallery openings in New York and Los Angeles, hustle in fast-gentrifying cities, and, sometimes, make quiet lives in Midwestern monasteries. Some command armies of fabricators while others patiently teach schoolchildren how to finger-knit. All of these artists might well be shown in the same exhibition, the quality of work far more important than education or income in determining whether one counts as a real artist. In The Work of Art, Alison Gerber explores these art worlds to investigate who artists are (and who they're not), why they do the things they do, and whether a sense of vocational calling and the need to make a living are as incompatible as we've been led to believe. Listening to the stories of artists from across the United States, Gerber finds patterns of agreements and disagreements shared by art-makers from all walks of life. For professionals and hobbyists alike, the alliance of love and money has become central to contemporary art-making, and danger awaits those who fail to strike a balance between the two. The stories artists tell are just as much a part of artistic practice as putting brush to canvas or chisel to marble. By explaining the shared ways that artists account for their activities-the analogies they draw, the arguments they make-Gerber reveals the common bases of value artists point to when they say: what I do is worth doing. The Work of Art asks how we make sense of the things we do and shows why all this talk about value matters so much.Product Identifiers
PublisherStanford University Press
ISBN-139781503603820
eBay Product ID (ePID)239564068
Product Key Features
Book TitleThe Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers
AuthorAlison Gerber
FormatPaperback
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2017
Number of Pages192 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height216mm
Item Width140mm
Additional Product Features
Title_AuthorAlison Gerber
Series TitleCulture and Economic Life
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States