Us All
You need us all
They agreed
The voices in my head
Altogether
Without me
You need us all
They agreed
Us not liking each other
Us saying stuff to you
You cannot say to other people
You need us all
They agreed
Us not agreeing with each other
Us arguing but speaking and being heard
Discussing things you cannot discuss with other people
You need us all
They agreed
We are your company
We are you
You are what we perform
In rehearsal
In your head
In conflict in your head
Invoking an outcome you may not expect
But useful
In that
We agree
Tag Archives: Psychology
Make art not ‘Art’
Making art nobody sees but you
This article is about Jonathan Beller, film theorist, culture critic and mediologist, and Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt University.
Beller is a writer and generally avoids having too much of his work online. His work skirts around art as research, but as an academic, not an artist. He is focused on visual culture, cinema and anything with a screen.
He has a Marxist background and sees the ideas of Marx as useful in understanding how social and cultural structures influence thinking and may help us think critically. He is an academic, and his work must be approached in this context. He does a few online things, see here, but I get a sense that he is most comfortable as a writer. Stick with the video as he does give his thesis, but does not present in a comfortable way. He lectures, but not that well.
What I found most interesting is his emphasis on visual culture, particularly what we attend to visually.
As an example, to open my mobile phone, I am now expected to look at it, gaze at it and have it gaze at me. He proposes that this is an act of having me become part of the world computer to make money through this as post-capitalist economic media. He proposes, for example, that this could be seen as labour as it makes money for the provider of the media, and provides me with a benefit, ie the phone and all that it does.
One bit of Marx that he talks about, in his very academic way, that has to do with art making that nobody sees but you, is to do with use value and exchange value, in this case, of the art you make.
Marx argued that workers in making stuff, prior to ‘capitalism’, ie being paid to work, the value of the stuff they made for themselves was in how they could make use of it, themselves. Marx called this ‘Use Value’. The worker grows corn and uses it to make bread, then eats it. The use value is retained by the person who grew the corn.
In making stuff for money for someone else, benefits came from ‘Exchange Value’. The stuff was exchanged for money. And the more times the stuff could be exchanged, the more money the person doing the exchanging makes. So the worker grows corn for a landowner, it is exchanged for money by the mill owner, it makes flour, which is exchanged for money by the bakery to make pastry, which is exchanged for money by Greggs, who sells the worker a sausage roll. All the people who do the exchanging make the most money, not the worker.
All I am suggesting is that in making art nobody sees but you, the use value is retained by you.
Exchanging art for money can be a great thing. Think of Picasso paying his bar bill with his signature on a paper napkin, or Jeff Koons selling a sculpture for $91,075,000 at Christie’s in 2019. If you want this, go for it.
But making art that nobody sees but yourself changes your relationship with what you make as art. It makes seeing its use value to you more available.
I cannot tell you what its use value is, only you can do that, or more importantly, the artwork tells you. This is useful in telling you something about your experience of making the art and thus something about your experience.
Clearly, if it’s exchange value would pay for a 3-week stay for you and your family in the Maldives this summer, then its exchange value to you is useful to you.
But making art nobody sees but you is a useful way of shifting your relationship with it away from exchange value to use value. And, if you do not see yourself as an ‘Artist’ because the art you make would clearly not sell, you retain the use value the art has in talking to you about experience. Seeing its use value makes you make it in a different way.
Experiential Learning at its Finest
Who’s learning who?
Six Hidden Forces That Kill Curiosity
How to overcome curiosity killers.
From Psychology Today
July 2, 2025
Curiosity is central to art making. It can be undertaken as a kind of adventure or as research in which we are curious to see what happens when we make some thing come into existence that has not ever existed before. The making of it will frequently bring up unexpected outcomes.
This article came into my newsfeed on July 2nd, and the author Jeff Wetzler, has done a great job of bringing a deft journalistic touch to a wealth of research evidence about curiosity with six clear ways curiosity is thwarted.
Jeff writes largely about curiosity about other people’s experience, and this is manifest in our encountering art made by other people. So in this sense, being open to art as insight into the experience of ‘the other’ intrinsically promotes diversity.
But personal arts practice as research may be understood to bring this insight into one’s own diversity.
The content is great call to embrace curiosity and I suggest viewing and doing art is a great way to nurture curiosity about others and the self. If one makes art outdoors, then the same curiosity may be nurtured regards the more-than-human world as well.
If you feel like you are in a state of writers block, or your curiosity to make art is diminished, the article may also have good advice as to possible causes and ways to unblock.
You can read the full article here on the original website and get access to other excellent articles by Jeff, or to view it on a separate page, click page 2 below. (Drop me a line if the pagebreak feature does not work.)
Imagination and action
This research connects imagination of future action and active visualisation, with intention and action.
In meditative practice, this is called the ‘Approach Mentaility’, meaning people tend to be more positive about approaching rather than avoiding things.
The article says ‘..the course of action people entertain in their imagination can influence the probability of actually taking that path.’
The study suggests limits of actions within a week of imagining the action. But regular art practice will involve regular imagining of outcomes. In meditation, Dr Dan Siegel calls this the act of ‘the state becomes a trait.’, a mental state becomes a behavioural trait.
Art as personal research. Walk your talk.
I read this excellent article in The Independent.
Click the image below to read it.
‘Inside the scandal that rocked behavioural science – and paved the way for revolution’ : Helen Coffey – The Independent – June 29, 2025.
It is about behavioural science, that branch of science that studies human behaviour. In the article it addresses a crisis, that of reproducibility in research.
To be ‘objective’ or have quantitative or qualitative rigour, research results must show reproducibility. That is, that other scientists do the same research and get the same results or that the results may be generally or universally applied, not be shown to apply to one person, or just the people studied in the research. There is talk, as alluded to here, that many old research and new research findings may, on reflection, be a bit ‘subjective’. That is applied to just the subject of study, not the general population.
There is reference throughout to sample size. To be objective, research findings of people are best done with a large sample size.
But if you alone are the subject and object of your own research, it can still be research, but research simply about you and your behaviour, your experience. You are the sample. A sample size of one.
Art as research produces a subjective outcome, thus is open to interpretation. But in conducting research through art making, you make yourself open to interpretation. Your sample size is small, but as such it may be taken to apply to you alone. In showing and sharing, your art may resonate with other people, but again, subjectively. There is no better way. You own your subjectivity, and it owns you. You walk your talk. You have made yourself both object and subject.
The point is that through art making thou art approaching a state and inhabiting a process in which thou may, through art making, come to better ‘Know Thyself’. In this, there are health benefits.
Moving Space 