Showing posts with label Make Art Make Money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Make Art Make Money. Show all posts

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Recommended: Make Art Make Money

Art fuels more art. The simple act of getting my ass down to the seat tends to do more for my creativity than nearly anything.  And yet, sometimes just moving those few feet to the desk or the coffee shop can seem easier to put off for just "a few minutes".  So I always try to supplement my off times, my idle moments, with books about art, or artists, and ways to cope with the challenges of creativity.  

The book I am loving right now is Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens.  


It explores the successful ways that Jim Henson was able marry art and commerce, much of which involved the "art as gift" philosophy.  The basic idea behind it is that art, by its very nature is a gift.  And yet, those creating that gift need to be able to support themselves in order to continue creating.  It's a basic truth, that for the creator, most of the financial gains from that art go right back into making more. And more often than not, the one who creates will put more effort, more time, and more money into it than is "wise" in a business sense of the word. Henson both epitomizes this, and made peace with this. He was able to keep the message of his work pure even though he was commodifying and selling likenesses of his characters.  The work never became about making money. The money was always to make more and better art.  Without The Muppet Show you could never have had The Muppet Movie, without which you could never have had The Dark Crystal, without which you could never have had The Story Teller, and so on.  This is true not just on a financial level, one funding the next, but on a creative level.  The artistic achievements and new understandings reached in one project made the next one possible.


One of the passages that I found particularly inspiring discusses Henson's 1972 television special The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, in which four mistreated animals escape their miserable masters to seek a new life. Hyde Stevens uses this work to parallel the creative struggles Henson was going through.

     Chased from his home, Leroy [the donkey] finds himself alone in the world, pulling junk that                
     "ain't worth nothin". He doesn't seem very lucky at all. But he can be. 

     Enter the frog. 

     Leroy laments his condition to Kermit, who happens to be sitting on a fence. "I'm on the road
     to nowhere," he says. "I gave ol' Mordecai eighteen years of hard work, and what do I have to 
     show for it?"

     Kermit points at the wagon.

     "It's mighty hard pullin'." The wagon, he thinks, is nothing but a burden.

     Kermit tells him he also has a tuba.

     "You mean this big kinda twisty funnel thing? I don't even know what it's fer!"

Kermit shows the donkey how to change his perception of his lot in life, that the things he views as a burden can actually be a salvation. The same can be said for every artist. We spend out lives trying to hide our injuries and imperfections and show only what we have decided is worthy. Doing this is like "a dancer, dancing with one hand behind her back" as my former acting teacher used to say.  Sharing the wounds artfully, allows intimacy between artist and viewer, and opens up a whole new pathway to explore, one that's likely to be very fertile territory because it is at the heart of what we are most passionate about.

Hyde Stevens continues:

     Henson's shoestring budget resulted in Kermit being fashioned out of the fabric from his
     mother's old coat, and that intern spawned the look of a thousand Muppets. His work in
     commercials [something Henson had very ambivalent feelings about] led both to a healthy
     workshop budget and eventually to Sesame Street, who's producers were trying to use the power    
     of commercials to teach. It couldn't be predicted from the outset, but each part led to the next part,  
     and eventually it added up to staggering success when Henson started to see the shape it might
     take.

     Henson may not have chosen his career up until 1958, but he was able to turn burdens into
     strengths. "Take what you got and fly with it," Henson said. Most of us simple don't know what 
     we've got.

Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career began as a series of essays published in , and these were later expanded to become a full exploration of Henson's work, and lessons from that way of working that we can use today.  It's available from Amazon.com, and is a steal at $9.19


         
     

                        

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