Back in the eighties, we started with the simple premise that Mark likes to paint. One thing led to another and, before you know it, he’s facing the boho dance. As Tom Wolfe puts it, “The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.” For us, every aspect of art somehow relates to this struggle or tension between the love for art and the validation the artist looks for by selling his or her art, or even by just having people appreciate it. Who makes art purely for himself?How others respond to your work is central to the process, like it or not. For us, what to paint, where to paint, how to paint, what to do with it after you’ve painted it, is all part of that process we like to call the boho dance.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Boho Dance
This title might be too long, but I think it describes what we want our book to be about. The boho dance is a term that is central to the business of art. The making of art is the most important thing, but for us everything that accompanies that makes up the boho dance. We think a lot about the struggle between making art and selling it, which is what Tom Wolfe was talking about in his book The Painted Word, where he first coined the term boho dance. He was the first, and Joni Mitchell was merely alluding to his book when she wrote the song of the same name. (Because both book and song came out the same year, 1975, we’re not completely positive about which came first.)
Back in the eighties, we started with the simple premise that Mark likes to paint. One thing led to another and, before you know it, he’s facing the boho dance. As Tom Wolfe puts it, “The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.” For us, every aspect of art somehow relates to this struggle or tension between the love for art and the validation the artist looks for by selling his or her art, or even by just having people appreciate it. Who makes art purely for himself?How others respond to your work is central to the process, like it or not. For us, what to paint, where to paint, how to paint, what to do with it after you’ve painted it, is all part of that process we like to call the boho dance.
Back in the eighties, we started with the simple premise that Mark likes to paint. One thing led to another and, before you know it, he’s facing the boho dance. As Tom Wolfe puts it, “The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.” For us, every aspect of art somehow relates to this struggle or tension between the love for art and the validation the artist looks for by selling his or her art, or even by just having people appreciate it. Who makes art purely for himself?How others respond to your work is central to the process, like it or not. For us, what to paint, where to paint, how to paint, what to do with it after you’ve painted it, is all part of that process we like to call the boho dance.
