This is a pared-down, demystified overview of the mental operations involved with creating things aesthetic, i.e., art, design, and the like. It is a disarmingly clearheaded and unsentimental look at the creative process by an eminent creator. The book’s photographs and design serve as an example of what the creative process, at its most sophisticated, can yield. Leonard Koren, who trained as an artist and architect, was a founding member of The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a wall-painting collective. In 1976 he created WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics. Koren has subsequently written numerous books about art, design, and aesthetics. among them are Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (the classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete), What Artists Do, and Musings of a Curious Aesthete.
“The use of the word ‘practice’ as in ‘her creative practice involves . . .’ began showing up with increased frequency during the 1970s in academic papers relating to conceptual art. The conceptual artists of that period produced many interesting ideas but few, if any, physical artifacts. So what were the critics and the art historians of that era to write about?
“Fortunately most conceptual artists could articulate, with remarkable clarity and specificity, the substance and subtleties of their thinking. This articulation was perceived to be a part of the art itself. ‘Practice’ then became the term used to denote the totality of thought, intention, and action constituting a conceptual artist’s working life—at least according to those writing about it.
“Subsequently, as contemporary art in general began to evolve in a more idea-driven (i.e., conceptual) direction, this use of ‘practice’ expanded even further. Today the term is used by most creators in the aesthetic domains to describe the essential contours of their working lives and creative production.”
80 pages