bcobb

Book Report: Art & Fear

Dec 1, 2014

I can’t remember who recommended I read Art & Fear (by David Bayles and Ted Orland), but Sam bought it for me for my birthday last year, and I finally sat down to read it¹. From the start, I was struck by how much the authors’ perspective on artmaking could just as easily apply to programming. Below are a dozen or so quotations pulled from the book that seem particularly relevant. I think they stand on their own without context, but the whole story is well-worth the price of the book.

• “Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself” (p. 2)
• “[We assume that] Artmaking involves skills that can be learned” (p. 3)
• “To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product…To you, and you alone, what matters is the process” (p. 5)
• “equating art with ‘self-expression’ reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium” (p. 7)
• “those who continue to make art are those who…have learned how not to quit”² (p. 9)
• “vision is always ahead of execution—and it should be” (p. 15)
• “the artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because [they imagine] it to be fast” (p. 17)
• “[Artists] get better by learning to work, and by learning from their work” (p. 28)
• “Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, you habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace” (p. 36)
• “On both intellectual and technical grounds, it’s wise to remain on good terms with your artistic heritage, lest you devote several incarnations to re-inventing the wheel” (p. 44)
• “When things go haywire, your best operating strategy might be to return…to the habits and practices in play the last time you felt good about the work” (p. 57)
• “certain tools make certain results possible”³ (p. 58)
• “The dilemma facing academia is that it must accommodate not only students who are striving to become artists, but also teachers who are struggling to remain artists” (p. 80)
• “your job as an artist is to push craft to its limits—without being trapped by it” (p. 99)
• “In making art you declare what is important” (p. 108)

I will say: I’m not comfortable drawing terribly stark lines between programming and art. For most programmers, the purpose of making a program is to accomplish something unrelated to the program itself. A finished program⁴ feels more utilitarian than a finished work of art. And yet, the internal design of a program and its utility are intertwined, particularly with regard to future utility (agility?). Certainly, the internal design is a subject of great interest and frequent debate to those who work on the program, down to the lowest level of abstraction⁵.

Then there’s the related matter of aesthetics⁶, which then veers into taxonomy/folksonomy/ontology territory, since identifiers lend to the aesthetic and are notoriously difficult to choose. The conversations around aesthetics and design often feel like conversations about art, even though the end-result is purportedly what really matters. This is to say, programming seems to be both an act of expression and an act of producing something useful, and I think there’s a tension between the two. Jacob Thornton (@fat) has a great post comparing the development of Ratchet and Twitter Bootstrap that explores this angle some more.

Waffling aside, I think there’s a rich vein of ideas at the intersection of programming and art, and I intend to revisit Art & Fear periodically to wrestle with them.

Thanks to Brett Chalupa for feedback on this post and for various conversations around this topic.