Tagged — Jamie Lyons
There's this thing happening where everyone's suddenly an artist, capital A, like it's a birthright instead of a blood pact. They've got the vocabulary down: disruption, authenticity, vision, borrowed wholesale from people who actually dragged themselves through the muck of making something real. They slap "Creative" in their LinkedIn bio like it's a participation trophy, not a sentence you serve.
Here's what they don't tell you: being an artist isn't about having good taste or the right aesthetic. It's not curating your life into a grid of carefully filtered moments. It's about showing up to the work when you're broke, when you're doubting everything, when your hands are shaking and the thing you're making looks like garbage. It's about the ten thousand hours nobody sees, the failures that don't make the highlight reel, the brutal, unglamorous repetition of trying to translate what's screaming inside your skull into something that exists outside of it.
The real ones? They're not posting about the process. They're in the process. Bleeding into it. They've internalized rejection like a permanent hum, learned to metabolize criticism as fuel. They understand that making art is less about self-expression (though there's that) and more about obsession bordering on pathology. It's compulsion dressed up as choice.
But the imitators, the self-proclaimed "Creatives," they want the identity without the initiation. They want to be artists without doing the artist thing: which is to create, constantly, often badly, usually for no money and less recognition. They confuse consumption with creation, curation with craft. They think buying the right notebook, the right software, the right workshop makes them part of the tribe.
What's worse is how they've weaponized the language. Every middle manager with a mood board is suddenly "creative." Every content strategist is an "artist." They've strip mined the terminology until it means nothing, until actual working artists (people destroying themselves slowly to make something true) have to find new words to describe what they do.
You don't choose to be an artist. It chooses you, and it's not a blessing. It's a defect, a compulsion, a magnificent curse. The people who can stop, do. The ones who can't keep going, not because they're special, but because they have no other choice. That's not romance. That's just survival dressed up as dedication.
FalseArt 2026
February 5, 1989. Beijing. The National Art Gallery opens China/Avant-Garde, the summing-up, the big one, a decade of work by artists who spent that decade being told there was no decade. Somebody hangs a no-U-turn sign on the banner outside. At about 11:10 in the morning a woman walks up to her own installation and […]
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FalseArt 2026
Look at them. Four guys in suits that probably cost less than your cell phone bill, standing under studio lights in grainy black and white… they look like insurance adjusters. Like men who file their taxes early. Joe Morello starts that shuffle on the cymbal, Brubeck drops that chord on the piano and something cracks… […]
ReadFinca Fiasco 2025
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1932, back when America thought it had figured out what it wanted to be, she got out. Did the expected thing first: BFA from Bowling Green, MFA from UCLA. But then she did what artists who actually give a damn do: she went to Paris in 1966, to Atelier 17, […]
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Industries 2024
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social […]
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FalseArt 2023
Antonin Artaud gets out of Rodez, nine years of psychiatric lockup, electroshock frying his brain, and the first thing he does is get near a microphone. Thévenin sets him up with this radio program, Club d’Essai, and Artaud records Les Malades et les médecins. The whole thing’s a middle finger to the doctors: You want […]
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FalseArt 2023
Revolutions don’t start with permission slips. They start in some paint-splattered shithole at three in the morning when you’re too broke and too angry to pretend anymore. They start when you realize the gatekeepers are idiots and their taste is garbage and you’d rather burn it all down than spend one more second nodding along […]
ReadFalseArt 2023
The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered. You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker […]
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FalseArt 2022
What we have here is a middle finger in epistolary form, three guys in 1943 Brooklyn, broke as hell probably, telling some poor bastard at the Times that his confusion is the whole goddamn point. And they’re right, which makes it even more dangerous. This isn’t a manifesto, it’s a divorce […]
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Individualism 2019
The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It […]
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FalseArt / Industries 2018
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile. RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students. RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment. […]
ReadIndividualism 2018
You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence. […]
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Wanderlust 2017
Here’s the thing about Burden’s forest of castiron streetlamps standing there like some municipal graveyard outside LACMA: it’s the kind of gorgeous, stupid, absolutely necessary gesture that makes you want to laugh and weep simultaneously. Two hundred and two vintage lampposts salvaged from the gutted streets of Los Angeles, arranged in rows like soldiers who’ve […]
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Individualism 2016
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. […]
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Industries 2016
The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it. Alexander Calder Look at this thing. Sitting there outside the law school like some kind of predatory bird that decided mid-flight to just fucking freeze, arrested in steel, suspended in […]
ReadIndustries 2016
What we’ve got here is the kind of conceptual sleight of hand that makes the museum going bourgeoisie feel dangerous for an afternoon. Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck) dragged peace itself into SFMOMA and roughed it up, reverse engineered it like they were hot wiring a stolen Cadillac for good intentions. They took […]
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Individualism 2016
Look at those hands. Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s […]
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Industries 2016
The academics want you to believe that live performance (the sweating, breathing, bleeding out loud presence of actual human bodies in actual space) carries some sacred charge that recordings can’t touch. That there’s magic in the ephemeral, nobility in the disappearing act. Every moment unique, finite, gone the second it happens. Like watching your best […]
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Industries 2015
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
ReadIndustries 2015
I am interested in ceremonies of the present. What is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. Diane Arbus, 1962 Nathalie Brilliant’s performance art piece at Fort Mason, San Francisco Art Institute To get at what’s real, and every artist worth a damn knows this is the whole rotten game, you need to fuck […]
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Industries 2014
I’ve seen a lot of places where people decide to make art happen, and most of them are lying to you about what they are. Di Rosa is different. It’s not lying. 22 acres of Northern California wetlands and this weird, sprawling collection that refuses to behave like a proper museum, it’s got that swampy, […]
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FalseArt 2013
Marina’s sitting there talking about Columbus and failure and presence, and here’s the thing that’ll piss off half the MFA programs in Brooklyn: she’s actually right, even when she’s being provocative as hell.This bit about Columbus, fuck yeah, it’s problematic, we all know the colonialism lecture by heart, but strip away the historical baggage for […]
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Industries 2013
Margaret Tedesco Cameo. Nights, and Night Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, […]
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Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are […]
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Industries 2012
What gets me is how performance becomes the only honest medium for dealing with governmental dishonesty. You’re creating something live, ephemeral, something that by its very nature can’t be perfectly preserved or controlled, the exact opposite of Nixon’s paranoid recording compulsion. There’s something genuinely radical about taking the most documented presidency in history up to […]
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Individualism 2011
Comfort is a fucking lie we tell ourselves. Pretty is a lie. You want pretty, go buy a goddamn Hallmark card or scroll through Instagram until your eyeballs bleed from all that curated, soft-focus horseshit. These portraits of Niki, this is what an artist actually looks like. Not the romantic bullshit version, not the tortured […]
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Individualism 1998
Psychedelic Art: Bill Ham inventor of the Light Show. Maybe this is how it all started. Me thinking I’m a photographer. That I have what it takes to make pictures that other people actually see. Not the travel snapshots everybody takes, the trite bullshit clogging up social media feeds from here to eternity. But real […]
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