For now, make something, learn something, and move on. Or you’ll be buried waist-deep in the big muddy of perfectionism. - Jerry Saltz

Every work of art is a culturescape of you, your memories, the moments you spent working, your hopes, energies, and neuroses, the times you live in, and your ambitions. Of the things that are engaging, mysterious, meaningful, resistant over time.

Surely, your crappy art can fake out twelve stupid people. I've seen it done with one or two.

The elephant in this big room, obviously, is context. In America, the twenty-first century began with the contested election of 2000, followed shortly thereafter by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From there came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial collapse of 2008, the lightning-rod election of the first black president, the rise of antidemocratic authoritarianism at the hands of his successor, and finally a second contested election and a worldwide pandemic that saw the death of one million Americans. All of which is to say: None of the art made in this period happened under “normal” conditions.