🖼️🎭🎶 how to write about art 🎶🎭🖼️

In this entry of the How To Be A Creative™ series, learn about the keys to writing about the arts.

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I always wanted to be an artist. A painter, to be specific! There was a period where I thought about becoming a priest (I blame my parents.) and there was a period where I pursued acting (I blame myself.) but it was always painting, the visual arts, that I was most interested in. For much of my middle and high school years, I painted. Poorly! Lots of non-objective splatterings that I tried to rationalize as emotion or a conveying of the world. To be blunt: I had no talent. I had tools and I had ambition but I did not have skill. Family and friends and those around me supported the pursuits, but they never developed into anything of note: it was just a stop on the journey to finding something like writing, a form of expression that I can competently and confidently convey ideas.

Such is the “artist’s journey,” a series of trial and errors to find yourself, your medium, and your best way to say what you’re trying to say. I say this because my deep love of the arts, of painting, has made me America’s Next Top Fan of Art™, meaning that I wanted to do whatever I could to talk about and celebrate and interact with the visual arts. That’s how I ended up creating something like Los Angeles, I’m Yours, which was multiplied by my being exhausted that people were constantly hating on Los Angeles in the late aughts and 2010s: it is the city of the arts and creativity. It’s where you go to realize creative dreams! No one is doing it like her.

And this writing about art paid off, literally and figuratively: this led to art writing for Playboy, Cool Hunting, Paper, and more. The writing was about art (This feature about Zackary Drucker is an all time favorite.) and not about art at all (This story on the movie Testament is one story I still think about.) but they all use the same tools of looking, loving, and sharing. That’s really the short of it: you look at something, you love something, you share something. That doesn’t mean things are without critique or that to write about the arts is to only gush. Instead it’s a sort of “you have to be interested to be interesting” sort of thing: if you care, other people will care. That is the key to writing about the arts.

But there are other keys too, at least in my view and my understanding of it. Every art writer (Or writer in general!) will have a different approach to this — but this is my approach. Art writing is still one of the things I’m most passionate about, even if this has been a dormant skill for years, given the collapse of certain outlets and my being removed from an art world’s center. Did I mention it pays basically nothing? Either way, it’s probably how we ended up with The Trend Report™ instead of The Art Report™. But never say never! Life is surprising!

So what are these keys to art writing? Let’s take a look, in the hopes of helping you unlock your creative writing about creative things, whether for ekphrastic purposes or because you’re an aspiring critic. Let’s go!

🔑 Know nothing.

People will disagree with this, to which I say: I do not care. I believe, very passionately, that one does not need an “education in art” to write about art. In fact, I suggest knowing nothing. A big issue with the arts — in painting and literature and theater and architecture and so many other “classic” arts — is that it’s off-putting, that it isolates and confuses people. Which is awful! The point of art is to reflect life and communicate our shared humanity in interesting ways. As a writer, it’s your job to help filter, understand, and share that. A big part of doing that is educating yourself through the art. Is this a medium you don’t understand? Do some research to understand it. Is this artist talking about a subject that you don’t quite understand? Research a bit, to understand the subject and to gauge if they do a good or not-good job at achieving that. I use art — Especially contemporary art! — as a channel for learning, to educate myself so I can “understand” it. If I cannot understand it, that’s when we have problems: that’s where the art may have failed or may need help, in that I — someone curious, someone on the outside, someone willing to understand — has difficulty connecting. Imagine your friends and family who are unwilling to self-educate in the name of art? They are likely to ever connect with such items. This is why I encourage not-knowing-much about the art that you’re going to write about because your job is to bridge people to it, to help them understand as you learn about it too. Does that mean be a complete dilettante, someone who rejects learning? Absolutely not. That’s the opposite what I’m saying: art is a channel for knowledge and you are a channel for helping spread such knowledge.

🔑 Consider your most curious friend — and your least.

To the above: I always consider that I am writing to my most and least curious friend. It’s my job as a writer to help them love this art that I love, to see what I see. Even if I “hate” what I’m writing about, I still want my most and least curious friend to experience the art. That’s what art writing should seek to do: help others understand why something is good or not-good, important or not-important. You’re the hype person, you’re the diviner: help them see the light.