Artists are everywhere, from celebrities showing at MoMA to locals
hoping for a spot on a café 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.
