NOTE: This is a manifesto-in-progress. It’s not righteous or applicable to everyone. It’s just something I’m working on for myself, to help me (as an artist) better process what I see others creating and to avoid what, to me, are nigh-inescapable eddies of snark, condescension, bitterness, and posturing that come from discussing art.

Enjoy, steal, add, critique, ignore.

• The measure of success/failure can only be gauged on what the artist herself was attempting to create.
• Audiences: The only acceptable compliment is sincerity.
• Audiences: The only acceptable comment is insight¹.
• There are 3 gifts from audiencing a work:
1. What you can apply to your own work (academic)
2. What you can apply to your life (spiritual)
3. What others can articulate (communal)
• Critique of an artist’s work requires 2 core understandings:
1. Where this work fits into the artists’ canon. Artistry is a process over a life, a single work unrelatable without the context of its predecessors.²
2. Where this work fits into the community of local work and global culture. A one-night only reading of a 10-minute play in suburban Chicago relates right now both to the regional playwriting scene as well as to Hollywood, Broadway, Washington, Wall Street, and the internet.
• Absolutism serves no one.³
• The way you make art has nothing to do with the correct way to make art.
• Taste is more important than history.
• History is more important than syntax.
• Syntax is more important than accepted narrative.
• Accepted narrative is more important than personal response.
• Personal response is more important than taste.
• Artists: Don’t. (Unless you like to.)
• Artists: Like to.

* Previous version: 0.1
¹ The hollow standby “That was interesting” violates this item. Variation: “I bet you’re proud.”
² Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Mark Rothko, Ann Rice’s Christ the Lord.
³ I remain firm on this point.