An Interview with Hugh MacLeod, Cartoonist | Lateral Action

June 28 2009, 12:53pm

The worst thing an artist can do is see marketing as “The Other”, i.e. something outside of themselves. It’s not.

At the end of the day, good art is still an expensive, labor-intensive, pain-in-the-ass thing to make. Technology may remove a specific barrier to entry - the way photography did to portraiture over oil paint, for example - but the good stuff [...] still remains really, really hard.

There has always been this traditional schism in the art world: 1. The Artist (Stereotypical, Heroic, Absinthe-Soaked, Crazy Guy). 2. The Patron (Beastly, Bourgeois Rich Guy). Again, another myth. I’ve always seen my collectors as my peers. People with the same kind of background, education, standard of living, aspirations and intellectual interests as me. They just happen to make their livings differently than me. I’ve never aspired to make art for The Medici’s, or “Make Art For The People, Man”. I always wanted to make cartoons that my friends liked. Which I did.

disqu