“The scheme of things is a system of order. Beginning as our view of the world, it finally becomes our world. We live within the space defined by its coordinates. It is self-evidently true, is accepted so naturally and automatically that one is not aware of an act of acceptance having taken place. It comes with one’s mother’s milk, is chanted in school, proclaimed from the White House, insinuated by television, validated at Harvard. Like the air we breathe, the scheme of things disappears, becomes simple reality, the way things are. It is the lie necessary to life. The world as it is exists beyond that scheme becomes vague, irrelevant, largely unperceived, finally nonexistent.”
—Allen Wheelis

Artmaking Comes Before Art

Artmaking is what an artist does; art is what an artist did. That’s the difference between the present and the past, the living and the dead.

Artmaking is not a tedious but necessary process an artist goes through in order to produce works of art. Artmaking comes first; artmaking is life. Art is the product, the byproduct, and occasionally the buyproduct of artmaking.

I based this work on my belief that art is my “lie necessary to life.” That’s a common belief in my statusphere, a given, an assumption bordering on a priori knowledge. (Most of my fellow artists also subscribe to the more controversial belief that there’s more to life than art, but that’s beyond the scope of this modest publication.)

“What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.”
—Tom Stoppard

“Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”
—Aldous Huxley

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”
—Charles Horton Cooley

“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
—Charles Baudelaire

“Genuine creativity creates the illusion of inner freedom, which I think is necessary for survival.”
—Donald Kuspit

“The craving to be understood may in the end be the merest egoism.”
—F. H. Bradley

“Art is the artist’s false Catholicism, the fake promise of an afterlife and just as fake heaven and hell.”
—Woody Allen

“Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife.”
—Arianna Stassinopoulos

“Art is not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.”
—Tristan Tzara

“I’m afraid I’m an agnostic in art. I just don’t believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug, it’s probably very useful for a number of people, but as religion it’s not even as good as God.”
—Marcel Duchamp

“There’s no such thing as good art or bad art. There’s only Art—and damn little of it!”
—James Thurber

“So-called modern art is merely the vaporings of half-baked, lazy people.”
—Harry S. Truman

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
—Marshall McLuhan

“The status of any object as ‘art’ and as ‘art object’ is propositional and not factual.”
—Joseph Kosuth

“If there hadn’t been women, we’d still be squatting in our cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization to impress our girlfriends.”
—Orson Welles

“Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.”
—Oscar Wilde

“Nothing matters much, and in the end nothing matters at all.”
—Arthur James Balfour