How to Be an Artist is an indispensable book of practical inspiration for creative people of all kinds. Brimming with dozens of brand-new rules, prompts, exercises, and tips designed to break through creative blocks, ignite motivation, and conquer bad habits, this book is designed to help artists of all kinds – painters, photographers, writers, performers – realize their dreams. Now, expanding on his viral cover story for New York magazine – and drawing on his decades of immersion in the art world – Saltz has the answers.

Includes such advice as:

• Make art for now, not the future
• No, you don’t need graduate school
• Recognize convention, and resist constraint
• Get lost
• Listen to the wildest voices in your head
• Know what you hate (it’s probably you)
• Finish the damn thing!
• How to recover from critical injuries

About the author: Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture. He is the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and a 2019 National Magazine Award. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and many others.

“I wish I had read these rules forty years ago and carried them around like a bible. By chance or design I’ve followed most of them at some point, but it took me a lifetime as an artist to find what worked. They are the generous, loving, enthusiastic, bullshit-free advice of a master communicator, just reading them makes me want to charge back into the studio” – Grayson Perry

“Being an artist is a lonely pursuit – twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the rest of your life. Most of the time it hurts. This book will help the pain” – Tracey Emin