Austin Kleon's book, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered is packed with gems.

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

I agree. But, a little bit goes a long way.


Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. “You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern,” says psychology professor Paul Bloom. “And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.” But our brains don’t work that way. “When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it— how much they like it, how valuable it is— is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.” 

Fact! Especially when pertaining to abstract art. Titles and one or two sentence descriptions add depth and mystery.

In their book, Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker recount an experiment in which they set out to test this hypothesis: “Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.” First, they went out to thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and bought a bunch of “insignificant” objects for an average of $ 1.25 an object. Then, they hired a bunch of writers, both famous and not-so-famous hired a bunch of writers, both famous and infamous, to invent a story “that attributed significance” to each object. Finally, they listed each object on eBay, using the invented stories as the object’s description, and whatever they had originally paid for the object as the auction’s starting price. By the end of the experiment, they had sold $ 128.74 worth of trinkets for $ 3,612.51. 

Yeah. Humans are suckers for a cool story. Just like restaurant menus, we eat first with our brains. Which fish sandwich would taste better:

1) Breaded cod on dark rye.

2) Fresh Icelandic cod, wild caught from the icy blue north Atlantic virgin waters, lightly dusted with organic flour, flash fried in non trans fat cholesterol free peanut oil, served on thick sliced oven hot Amish Heidelberg pumpernickel bread.

I would pick number 2 too.

  

“To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.” —Errol Morris