John M Davis

I’ve mentioned in a previous post how reading is a huge source of inspiration for my music. Reading about an artist, their craft, and their influences is even more inspiring. A book covering 43 artists from multiple disciplines, backgrounds, generations, and cultural frames of reference is absolute gold.

In ‘The Work of Art’, Adam Moss wanted to go deeper than just examining artists’ finished work. He wanted to know how these works came about and most important, the process that got the work from conception to “done” whatever that might mean. In other words: he wanted to discuss the work of making the work.

Rather than do an historical survey of artists from the last couple centuries, these examinations are primarily in the form of interviews with artists working today. There is a good reason for this: the kinds of things that Moss wanted to illuminate are more often than not internal processes. The thoughts and ideas the doubts and dead ends. These are the types of details that artists do not generally write about making it difficult to get at these questions from historical sources. In addition, I noticed in many cases, Moss asked questions that the artist themselves hadn’t considered before, unearthing thoughts rather impossible to surface from those no longer with us.

Moss’ conception of what constitutes an “artist” goes beyond painters, musicians, and poets. All three of those disciplines are well represented but Moss expands the term to include chefs, puzzle designers, journalists, and radio hosts.

As I suggested above, the interviews are not so much about craft, although that is often discussed, instead Moss digs into the process of conceptualization and how the artists’ understanding of the work evolved over time. He wanted to understand when a work would evolve from an idea, through its iterations, and into a finished work of art.

I spent a great deal of time with each of these interviews, it probably took me three months to work my way through all 43 of these. Meeting each artist through Moss sent me down myriad rabbit holes chasing down works by these artists and learning about their works and gathering inspiration from their stories.

I also saw myself in quite a few of these people. I’ve always believed that regardless of discipline, most artists have more in common with each other regardless of how they make art. Reading these interviews, as a composer, the degree to which other artists revise, rethink, and frankly trash ideas and works in progress is perversely reassuring. The strange cocktail of triumph and ambivalence that many of them feel when a work is completed tells me I’m not alone mourning the end of the process.

If you make art, want to make art, or just want to know more about how artists do their thing (note: we’re all artists, every single one of us, so…) this book is worthy of your time.

The Work of Art by Adam Moss

Published by Penguin Random House, 2024