Real Artists Ship
by Alex
I’ve changed the motto in this blog’s masthead to reflect the fact that the date of my dissertation defense is now written, if not in stone, than in very very hard plastic and is only two and a half months away. Dissertations are complex documents — mine is now 375 pages long — and finishing them is so deeply entwined with your psychologicla well-being and professional progress that opening that black box of your psyche and looking inside in order to figure out ‘how you feel about your dissertation’ simply doesn’t make sense.
Better to just focus on the finish line. I’ve always liked Steve Levy’s charming little book _Insanely Great_ on the history of the creation of the first Macintosh, and I’ve now adopted Steve Jobs’s motto as my own. As Levy writes:
Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project [the release of the first Mac] was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was [Douglas] Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — _he didn’t ship._ What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — _they didn’t ship._ The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the tists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.
But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.
Real artists ship.
The light, the light. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.
Wonderful And do not forget the Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s post-modern masterpiece, “Real Artist Shit”. The only words on cans containing the artists excrement. Now at the Herning Museum in Denmark.
Here then is another take on Jobs.
The cans resemble a mass produced product. Whatever the artist produces, so long as it gets out is art. Here Jobs comforts at another level. Sh*t too can be art. He is encourging the perfectionists to deliver.