Marketing Mondays: Artists, Should We Write and Curate?

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Rene Magritte, The False Mirror, 1928, oil on canvas; photoraphed at MoMA

Why not look beyond the studio to take, make, find or cultivate the opportunities to write about art and curate exhibitions? What do you think?

As an artist who blogs, I have created an opportunity to write about art. I think of myself as a reporter with opinions, or as my friend Jackie Battenfield calls me, "a commentator." This blog has also given me the chance to "curate"--that is, to assemble images of artists's work under one theme or another. I've also had the opportunity to curate in bricks-and-mortar spaces. Sometimes I get paid; other times it's for the pleasure of stepping outside the box to exercise my eyes and brain in a different way.

Certainly focusing on these other projects takes away from my painting time, but after so many years in the studio, the work knows how to find its way out. I actually like the breaks that writing and curating create. Moreover, as they stretch my thinking I find that more ideas make their way into my painting brain.

So here are my questions to you:
. Do you also write or curate?
. Are writing and curating a natural extension of our kind of thinking? Or are they a drain on our practice?
. Do you think we're setting ourselves up for a conflict of interest?

. Finally, are there any writers and curators reading? What do you think of "the competition"?

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