Adam Moss
speaker
88 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Moss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, possibly never met. You know, Gregory Crutzen, who talked about his work as almost a mathematical formula from like William Eggleston to Ray Carver's short stories to David Lynch and Blue Velvet, some combination of people with sensibility that in his own mind came together. Describe what a Crutzen photo looks like. A Crutzen photo is a gigantic...
photograph that resembles a movie still, lit like a movie, with enough narrative portent, but with no before or after. So the viewer is meant to supply the narrative by looking at this picture and putting it into a context of his or her own imagination.
Yeah. I, in general, don't much care about the strict definitions of anything. This book is a book about artists, but really I've bent the term artist pretty much as far as it can go. And I also believe that about mentorship, which in the end, it doesn't matter.
Well, one interesting thing about the book was I kept looking for who is the person who encouraged you when you were young. They weren't necessarily the person who was by your side when you were an adult, but there had to be somebody who could be a parent, could be an art teacher, could be anybody, who basically saw something in them.
And that seeing was crucial to the development of their confidence that they could make the thing, which is, of course, confidence and what I, in the book, call faith, the faith that they are actually able to make the thing that's in their head, which they can't, but you have to believe you can in order to go forward.
Oh, seriously? Well, just the word sounds so ugly. It's so beautiful, the thing that it's describing. And the word itself is so crude, really.
I sound maddening from your description. I sound like I must have been just a horrible person to work for, but okay. Maddening maybe a little bit.
Yeah, the book is not self-help, so I'm not sure a lot of these things can be learned. I mean, you can get better at everything, but you're either a person who can focus or you can't. You're either obsessional or you're not. You have a high tolerance for tedium, which you need to to be an artist, or you don't. You have drive or you don't. What about taste? You have taste or you don't.
Or you have a certain sensibility or you have a certain sense of humor. These are all things that you acquire... for all sorts of mysterious reasons that you and I don't understand. No one has ever understood how personality is formed.
That all said, the book is, I hope, very encouraging to artists because I think most people who are trying to make things don't need to be James Joyce or Pablo Picasso or Louise Gluck, even. They can be themselves, and they can find... immense joy and satisfaction in making art. They improve their ability to focus. They improve their ability to persevere, to not give up when things get hard.
A lot of art making comes down to something as rudimentary as being able to learn to fail. Again, like parenting, it's a little bit like a child learns to walk because they understand how they can get up from falling. They have to fall.
And I was very well aware of that, that this is a retrospective history of success. And so everything has to be viewed through that lens.
I wanted very much to give people permission to fail because failure is, if you go through the narratives in the book, there's just failure right and left. When you're trying to create something, your brain is trying to subvert you in so many ways. There are so many obstacles, and there is this kind of animus you need to have in order to barrel ahead. An animus toward what?
Animus is the wrong word. You have to have a fighting spirit, I guess I would say, where you're just not going to be daunted. Which, as I was going through this, I found very reassuring. Because, of course, the reason I did the book was because I... I had recently taken a painting and felt enormous frustration, enormous sense of failure in that. And truly, what I didn't understand is in a group,
There is a conversation that happens that's external. You and I, if we're working together making a magazine, we talk about something. There's a phrase that came up in the David Simon chapter called the bounce. Our method of making something better is by bouncing. I say something to you, you say something to me, bang, bang, bang.
In the end, something happens which is better than it was when we started. In most artists' lives, that conversation has to happen in their own head. I became very confused. How does someone have this kind of inner dialogue? And that's what I was trying to understand.
So would this book exist had you been a better painter? Probably not. I would not have had The Drive, which was born of my own frustration. Also, I would have been satisfied painting all day because I would, I hope, have taken a certain kind of satisfaction from the painting itself that, you know, why do you want to do anything else?
I just want to do this all day long, which now I feel actually not because I've gotten to be a better painter, but because I understand something about my relationship to painting that I learned from the book. Which is what? When you say this in this context, it sounds so banal, but here I'll say it.
No, well... There's a way in which that's a description. But what I would really say is that I was trying to create narratives, and so for the narrative to work, I wanted a happy ending. I wanted an exaltation. I wanted that moment in the rom-com with the big kiss at the end where everyone lives happily ever after.
And the artists themselves, when they would get to that point in their own storytelling of their own work, refused to give me that. They would express a certain amount of relief that the thing was over. Maybe they would say, yeah, it was nice. I was glad other people got to see it and I heard some nice things about it. But you never got the big firework.
Showing 61–80 of 88 · page 4 of 5
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