100 Books Like Aphorisms for Artists

I love this book because it not only explores the way in which art gets made, it delves into the reasons art often doesn’t get made, and the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.

All too often, the give-up factor is prevalent both in the art-making process and in the art-marketing process. I particularly liked the chapter “ Fears of Others,” which offers excellent insights into artists giving their power away. 

As a career coach and artist advocate, I was curious about what the author had to say about the inner workings of the art world. Quite happily, I read an insightful and humorous probe from a writer who sincerely wanted to understand art and its importance.

Bosker is not afraid of naming names when discussing critics, gallery owners, curators, collectors, and artists. She goes undercover, so to speak, and writes about her experiences as a gallery assistant, an artist’s assistant, a museum security guard, and a sales assistant at Art Basel Miami. And to add to her experiences, she tackles the use of the foreign language of “art speak.”   

Filled with many humorous pages of ridicule about the modern art world, one big reason that I love this book is Wolfe’s attack on “art speak,” the nauseating language used by critics and artists alike. He smugly suggests that in today’s world, visual art only exists to illustrate the text!

Pretentious prose has become a norm in art world communication. Although artists vehemently criticize this style of writing, unfortunately, many believe that their work will not be taken seriously unless they imitate what they despise.

When I was very young, I experienced firsthand an ugly lawsuit involving an art gallery. I can’t stress enough how important it is for artists to be knowledgeable and up-to-date on the legal aspects affecting their careers.

The new edition of this book will be of great help because it thoroughly covers the many changes in art laws and artists' legal rights and obligations, including, for example, the laws protecting artists in artist-gallery relationships.

Nietzsche said; “Only those with very large lungs have the right to write long sentences.” Montaigne was of the same opinion. He pre-dated Nietzsche in couching his philosophy simply and clearly in short, sharp aphorisms. Like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, they are often very funny.

Few thinkers have done more to advance and popularize the discipline of Big History in recent years than David Christian. He coined the term and has worked with Bill Gates to deliver Big History teaching to high school students around the world. The book I’ve picked out here is a little more academic and detailed than the others, and provides a really solid overview of this approach to integrating large-scale history from the Big Bang to the present. 

First published in 1947, this iconic book of the “Frankfurt School” could not be a study of AI and 21st-century technologies per see.

Instead it is a phantasmic explainer of how the mistakes of the past impinge on our humanity and the prospects for a better future. "What we had set out to do," Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

With spectacular erudition, the authors clearly show how the terror regime of the Nazis was rooted in the nefarious legacies of enlightenment Europe and its obsession with racial purity. As such, Adorno and Horkheimer presaged why it is that our polluted history feeds into racist AI technologies: Bad data, Adorno and Horkheimer would agree, produces bad outcomes. 

This is a well-argued and illuminating book to understand the complexity of terrorism. Primoratz focuses mostly on what we understand by the term “terrorism” and some of its most important characteristics. In doing so, he offers a definition of terrorism that meshes with our ordinary use of it. So, for him, terrorism is the deliberate use of violence against innocent people to intimidate and coerce others into doing what they otherwise would not do.

One of the virtues of his definition is that it avoids the double standard that policymakers presuppose when they define terrorism solely as the deliberate use of violence by non-state actors. Such a narrow definition of terrorism allows for representatives of states, be they tyrannical or democratic, to engage in vicious violence against innocent noncombatants without assuming moral or legal responsibility for their despicable violent acts that are no less terroristic, sometimes even more so, than… show more.

Last and First Men is an imagined history of the human race over two-billion years into the future. The beauty of this work is its ability to give the human race meaning and significance, whereas most other works of such scope instead seek to dwarf humanity and its significance under the scale of the universe. Stapledon achieves this by infusing his narrative with compassion, and with an underlying admiration for the process of evolution. Moreso than Darwinian evolution, the process humanity undergoes is more aligned with Hegelian, idealist dialectical movements, and implicitly evokes many questions about the nature of consciousness, our place in the universe, and what is essential about humanity. Though I cannot quite say why, the book has a refreshingly optimistic quality. I read this book shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, and it brought me much vitality.

No American writer of the 20th century could make ideas and personalities come alive as effectively as Wilson; he did this both for the sweep of the Russian Revolution (the Finland Station in St Petersburg is where Lenin launched the Revolution); and for specific individuals, books, and artistic performances. I was delighted to discover that Wilson was also Richard Hofstadter’s literary inspiration.