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On 10 cool things about being an artist


1. You can go to art school and hang around with very beautiful, talented (mostly), and talkative people.

2. You can very quickly dispense with the whole notion of success based on money and status.

3. You get to make beautiful objects that nobody understands, nobody wants, but which everyone at some point needs.

4. When someone asks you at a party 'What do you do?', you can say 'I am an artist/sculptor/writer/musician', while they have to say 'I am an accountant/trader/waiter/government employee'.

5. Instead of going to an office, you can go to your studio, which is a cross between a bear pit and a magic cave.

6. Instead of worrying about mundane things like mortgages and retirement portfolios, you have lofty thoughts about the role of art in an age of unreason, or the ontological basis of Duchampian claims for the verisimilitude (or lack thereof) of the found object.

7. Occasionally you get to display your work in a public setting, and people come up to you and tell you that you are a very talented individual, and they give you money for the things that you have made.

8. If 7, then you subsequently have the thrill of converting said money into art materials/studio rent/drinks for friends.

9. If you do what you do for along enough, you meet all kinds of people you would not otherwise have met: geniuses, morons, saints, sociopaths, neurotics, thugs, sluts, and gallery owners. (Dear Current and Future Gallery Owners: Just kidding.)

10. You become a member of an Order that has existed for thousands of years, with no clear rules except to be serious about what you do and to dedicate as much of your Self to it as you can.

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