“It’s About the Struggle:” New Book Goes Inside the Creative Process

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next to creating art. Ever wondered how artists make great pieces? Is it talent, discipline, ruthless self-editing, promotion, or something more personal? Adam Moss, the former award-winning New York magazine editor, became fascinated with this question when he made the switch to painting. In his new book, “The Work of Art,” Moss delves into the minds of creatives and their artistic processes, and he tells Walter Isaacson what he’s observed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And, Adam Moss, welcome to the show.

ADAM MOSS, AUTHOR, “THE WORK OF ART”: Thank you, Walter. Really great to be here.

ISAACSON: Your book begins with the squiggly drawing that Frank Gehry does as a thought of what the Guggenheim and Bill Boer will be. Then you go to the Guggenheim, and I think I also remember you did a story on the Guggenheim when you were at New York Magazine comparing it to Marilyn Monroe.

MOSS: Right.

ISAACSON: Tell me how that squiggly becomes that building and what you learned from Frank Gehry.

MOSS: Well, I was just riveted by this. I was actually in the gift shop of the museum. And the building itself is just this weird, crazy building, which, yes, that Herbert Muschamp, the old architecture critic of “The New York Times,” this is when I was the editor of “The New York Times” magazine. And he had written this tribute to this building, which was — I mean, now we’re used– kind of used to what Frank Gehry does. But at that time, this was kind of the first of them and it was like, whoa, what is he doing here? And to be in the building, opening this book called “Gehry Draws,” and to see this first or early thought manifested is just a fabulously crazy doodle was to see that initial thought in action. And then — you know, then comes a lot of struggle and a lot of engineering problems, et cetera, but that first impulse was caught in this drawing, which so moved me. And that’s why I started the book with it, because it was so beautiful to me.

ISAACSON: You know, I was like halfway through the book, I’m a bit slow, when I realized the double meanings that hit me of the title, “The Work of Art,” and that is — it’s not just about the artwork, it’s about all the work that goes into it. Tell me about how you decided to pick that title and make that the theme of the book.

MOSS: Well, the first title of the book was “Editing.” Something you would recognize.

ISAACSON: Well, you too. You were the great editor back then in our day.

MOSS: Trying to — thank you. Trying to claim editing in a broader way than we basically understand it in terms of moving words around and that sort of thing, or even images in a film context, but then that just seemed too limited. And what I was really after was something more mundane, which is the labor and what constitutes the labor of the making of art, something I was deeply curious about and actually had a kind of psychological need to understand. As I was trying to do my own art, I — when I left magazines, I tried to be a painter, still trying to be a painter. And I kind of didn’t understand how artists think, or I felt I didn’t understand how artists think. And I felt I could do maybe get a hold on that by tracing the actual work, both the steps and also, more particularly, the sort of psychological state of an artist as they work through something. So, eventually, the pun of “The Work of Art” just occurred to me, and it was just exactly what I was after. The subtitle of the book is “How Something Came from Nothing,” and I was trying to understand that narrative.

ISAACSON: You talk, though, about your own disposition, you call it, to be collaborative, which made it a little bit harder for you to be a painter, I think.

MOSS: Oh, definitely, yes.

ISAACSON: Yes. What is it? Is it disposition that makes an artist?

MOSS: I think it’s a lot of qualities. I think there’s a discipline — I think, first of all, they have to have access to their imagination. I should start right there. They have to be able — I mean, a lot of the books talk — a lot of the subjects in the books talked about having ADHD, which I don’t know whether that’s true in a clinical sense. But the basic movement of what ADHD suggests to people, which is the distract ability and then the hyper focus on one thing pretty much defined, in a lot of ways, what — how an artist works, they wander and then they bear down. And the ability to do that, to be able to sort of traverse the imagination and then the hardcore discipline, the work of shaping the thing was kind of the key to all of it. And they had just to get back to editing. They had a terrific ability to edit themselves, to actually see what their imagination had kind of spewed out and then to make various strategic decisions based on their own reaction to it. They’re highly —

ISAACSON: Well, give me some examples of that, because there’s wonderful things in the book with a mini drafts, whether it’s a work of art or a gate to Lee’s story on Frank Sinatra, in which you see the editing process.

MOSS: Yes. So, for example, George Saunders, he wrote all these notes to himself in which he was kind of evaluating what it was that he’d thrown on the page and somewhat ruthlessly creating a map toward moving from draft to draft. Amy Sillman, she made like a hundred versions of a painting that we talk about called “Miss Gleeson,” where she just painted over and over and over really beautiful paintings on the way to this fantastic painting she ended up with. But to see all of the steps, to see all the examples, to see all the things that she destroyed on the way to creating was actually almost to see an artist in action. It was almost as if I was making a picture documentary and you could see the movement, the moments. And I tried to recreate that in the book. I tried to somehow make that narrative come alive.

ISAACSON: You know, you set up a tension at the beginning of the book between sort of Arden who says, hey, it’s a talent you’re born with. And then, I think it’s Baldwin, right? Who says —

MOSS: Yes.

ISAACSON: — no, no, it’s discipline and the rigor. And at the end of the book, you say — you haven’t really decided which, but as I go through the book, I think I’m on Baldwin’s side, it’s all about the discipline and the rigor.

MOSS: Well, I think you need both, is the thing. I think it’s helpful. It’s at least helpful to be talented. One should dismiss that fact, is that there are some people who have an easier time at this than others, and some people who have a kind of personality that allows them to access the it, if you will. And — but then, yes, it’s like it’s the ability to endure failure. This book is littered with failure. It’s almost like a Roadrunner cartoon. Is that people just keep falling off the cliff. And their capacity to pick themselves up, to sort of hack through the wreckage and to keep going, is deeply impressive to me. And I think the mark of someone who really succeeds as an artist.

ISAACSON: Throughout the book, the idea of spirituality and faith pops up every now and then. And you asked all the artists you spoke with, what is the source of their inspiration? And it was a musician, Moses Sumney, who gives you an answer, it comes from God, absolutely. You admit that you had trouble appreciating the importance of faith. Have your feelings evolved on that when so many people talking about the spirituality that’s involved in art?

MOSS: Well, I mean, I just have become — I’m just a deeply secular person. And so, I — my own understanding of where these things come from has more to do with the subconscious than it does to do with God or some other otherworldly inspiration. But I think, basically, we’re just talking about the same thing. It’s the thing you don’t understand. And there’s a certain acceptance of the thing that you don’t understand that you have to come to as an artist. And I had to come to as a writer about artists. But faith, the interesting thing about faith is that it has several different meanings. Again, it’s — and one of those meanings is faith in yourself. And there’s a great quote by Walker Evans, the photographer Walker Evans, where he talks about having learned faith and he recognized that faith might be read by other people as a kind of egotism, but you can’t make anything without a certain kind of faith in yourself, a kind of inner ability that you can make this thing that you’re trying to make, which I actually personally as a painter, lack completely. I have no faith whatsoever. I’m trying to get some. And faith does come from experience, but it also comes from character.

ISAACSON: You also talk about self-sabotage. I think you’ve talked to Amy Sillman about it and others. Explain what that is and why that’s important.

MOSS: Well, I don’t know why it’s important, but it’s a fact that I encountered over and over again, that something in the mind is trying to prevent the artist from making the thing. The mind is trying to protect the artist in some ways. We — you know, we’re all very good at protecting ourselves from a certain kind of pain. And artists do that too. And — but a certain kind of pain is clearly necessary to the making of the thing, or at least getting in touch with something raw and maybe difficult. And so, they — so their mind takes over and tries to — you know, tries to disturb the thing. And that — that’s one of the many, many things that they have to fight their way through on the way to the finished work.

ISAACSON: You talk about the virtues you need, but you also say there’s a combination of virtues and flaws together. I think a couple of people in the book explore that. Tell me about who talked to you about that.

MOSS: Well, I have a conversation with Sheila Heti, the novelist, Sheila Heti, which I put in the end of the book, because I thought it said it pretty well. And she was saying, well — where I was talking about this thing that I couldn’t let go of, which is, is how is it that some people can make art and not others or others have more trouble with it? And she said, well — she said, it’s — you know, for me, it’s just that I can endure tedium. I like sitting around. I like the boredom. And there is a lot of tedious work that goes into making kind of almost anything. And they can just endure it because they’re kind of built that way. And they don’t have other — you know, they don’t — they may not have other virtues. They may not — I mean, I don’t know. You know, they may not, ultimately be kind. Kindness isn’t necessarily related to the making of art, though empathy certainly is. But they have a kind of list of characteristics, whether they be virtues or flaws, in our observation of it, that add up to the characteristics that make being artists being an artist possible.

ISAACSON: One other unusual piece of art in the book is Dean Baquet, the editor of “The New York Times,” former editor, doing a front page of “The New York Times.” You actually have a few front pages, but especially the ones of what we lost in COVID, and it also harkened back to your “New York” magazine days where graphic design and the visual display of information becomes a piece of art. Tell me what you learned from that one.

MOSS: Well, OK. so in that case, the work itself that we discussed was a front page, “The COVID Lost,” which if anyone remembers that front page and kind of pays attention to how “The New York Times” talks, they would have been shocked by it. It was almost like a Maya Lin Vietnam Memorial that simply listed in tiny, tiny type, the COVID dead. This was at the moment of the 100,000th COVID dead in 2020. And that just seemed as someone who had worked at “The New York Times” for a lot of years, extraordinary. Like how does an institution, especially as traditionally hidebound institution as “The New York Times” create this within its own context, radical work that was, to me, categorically, not a piece of information in the way that “The New York Times” front page is, information, hierarchy, judgment, all that kind of thing. But it was like the Vietnam Memorial a kind of tribute that was an artistic work. So, how did that happen? And I talked to Dean Baquet, who’s the editor at the time and to Tom Bodkin, who was the chief designer, about the steps, which were — really, originally, they had made all these baby steps. You know, we talked about some of these other front pages at the beginning. COVID was so huge a story and so important to impress upon the readers. It’s extraordinary historical meaning that they tried all these baby steps. They like — which would not — they’re too complicated to explain here. But they were all ways to disturb or disrupt the way the New York — the front page usually worked. And then, that emboldened them to try something incredibly radical, which was to devote the entire page to this in a way that would have visual impact and not verbal or an impact through text. And even though this was text, it was functioning. You couldn’t really read the names. It was functioning as a piece of visual information or visual storytelling. I mean, the book doesn’t deal very much with the way the creativity works in institutions, but this was one example I thought was pretty striking and I wanted to include it in, in some ways, as a compliment to the traditional ways that people make art.

ISAACSON: Did you get, by the end of the book, the answer you were trying to find out when you began the book?

MOSS: I did actually have a breakthrough. Because over and over and over again, I would try to get the artist, this is just part of my journalist training. You’ll recognize this as a — you know, from your own journalist work, you kind of want a catharsis. You want something to work with. You want the, like, exaltation, oh, my god, I’ve made this thing. I’d like — you know, I’d hope that the book would be just one huge aha, aha, aha, after another. And they would have that, you know, feeling of like almost like a rom-com montage where they’re finally fall in love at the end. And I wouldn’t get it. No one would — no one had that kind of exultation when they reached the end of their work. They would feel relieved. You know, they would feel like, OK, I got somewhere, OK, it’s finished, OK, I’m exhausted. I’m ready to do something else, but they would never have the, oh, my God, I made this thing that we all recognize as these classics, these beautiful masterpieces. And what they would tell me over and over again is that they would say, you know, it — it’s not about the thing that I’m making, it’s about the work itself. It is about the struggle to make the thing. That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what I go. That’s what gives me my sense of joy. And it also just defines me as an individual. And there was somewhere around the third year of writing this book, I finally like took it to heart and I said, yes, it’s about the work. And I brought that back to my own painting. And now, that’s how I paint. I — you know, and as a result, I’m actually painting better things, but that’s not even the point. The point is to relish the making of the thing itself. And I love that.

ISAACSON: Adam Moss, thank you for joining us.

MOSS: Thank you very, very much.