The Art of the Project Response

When reading The Art of the Project, I felt there were important lessons to be learned. I gained insight both into my project, my project’s surrounding culture, and coexistence between project and amateur.

Oftentimes, a project is often a reflection of current movements or surrounding contexts. On page 2, it’s noted that this is how literary and visual projects emerged side by side, often focusing on topics of form, psychology, or expression of inner life. It’s almost blatantly obvious that art is a product of surrounding culture, but awareness of this culture is still crucial for a project's progression. For any person concerned with making art or, more generally put, a project, it should beg a question; “What is my cultural movement?”  Introspectively, my work concerns itself with distilling connections between knowledge and information. This could indicate a cultural need for differentiation between knowledge and information, and indeed it does as the project is being made during the information age. Due to a drastic increase in available information over the past decade, people are faced with more information than they ever have been before. Unless the human memory also experiences a sharp increase in retainable information, people will be forced to have higher processing abilities to digest the abundance of information. In other words, when our capacity to know is exceeded by our intake of information, we must find a way to distil information down to a lower value. And moreover, information can be quantified by measurements of ordered patterns, but how is amount of knowledge grasped? It’s common to speak of knowing or not knowing in objective terms, but there currently exists no objective form of evaluating knowledge. These issues and concerns which my project faces would likely not be brought about if it weren’t for the dramatic increase accessible information.

Another lesson to be noted is the connection between amateur and project. On first thought, both are recognized as being part of a developmental stage. The amateur aspires to master his or her skill set, often facing an unforeseeable journey to mastery. Likewise, the project implies a lack of completion as it’s defined by being  in progression. On page 10, the amatur is claimed to mix “subjectivity and objectivity” in a borderline “manic” and “high-minded” fashion. Such elements fuel the project, making it able to sustain its perpetual journey. In that sense, the journey needs the amatuer in a sort of symbiotic fasion. The amature sustains the journey while a person is able to be called amature because he or she is on a journey. Once the journey ends or, similarly said, the project finishes, the armature becomes a master, and the project becomes a polished work.

From this reading, I gained awareness of myself, my surrounding culture, and the art I hope to make.