1. You can go to art school and hang around with very beautiful , talented (mostly), and talkative people. 2. You can very quickly dispense with the whole notion of success based on money and status. 3. You get to make beautiful objects that nobody understands, nobody wants, but which everyone at some point needs. 4. When someone asks you at a party 'What do you do?', you can say 'I am an artist/sculptor/writer/musician', while they have to say 'I am an accountant/trader/waiter/government employee'. 5. Instead of going to an office, you can go to your studio, which is a cross between a bear pit and a magic cave. 6. Instead of worrying about mundane things like mortgages and retirement portfolios, you have lofty thoughts about the role of art in an age of unreason, or the ontological basis of Duchampian claims for the verisimilitude (or lack thereof) of the found object. 7. Occasionally you get to display your work in a public setting , and people ...
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more