How to Be an Artist Book Review: The Pep Talk Every Creative Person Deserves (But Never Gets)

Rating: ★★★★

"How to Be an Artist" Book Review:

Jerry Saltz has been the art critic at New York Magazine and its offshoot Vulture for years, and before that he spent over a decade at the Village Voice. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018. The man has spent his entire adult life looking at art, arguing about art, and thinking about what makes art matter. So when he sits down to write a book called How to Be an Artist, you listen.

But here's the thing that makes this book special: it's not about art theory. It's not about movements or manifestos or the kind of gatekeeping nonsense that makes regular people feel like creativity is some exclusive club they weren't invited to. It's a pep talk. A really, really good pep talk. The kind you wish your college professor or your mentor or your weird artist uncle had given you before you spent years second-guessing every creative impulse you ever had.

Saltz lays out practical, honest advice about the actual experience of making things. He talks about fear — how it's not something you overcome once and then you're done, but something that shows up every single time you sit down to create. He talks about being broke and blocked and feeling like a total fraud, and how none of those things disqualify you from being an artist. He says things like "make art out of what you're afraid of" and "don't compare your insides to other people's outsides," and these aren't bumper-sticker platitudes — in context, with his voice and his decades of experience behind them, they land like truths you've always known but couldn't articulate.

The audiobook is the way to go here. Saltz narrates it himself, and his voice has this crackling, caffeinated energy that makes you feel like he cornered you at a gallery opening and is just telling you things. It's only a couple of hours long, but it's dense. I've gone back to it multiple times, and every time I pick up something I missed.

If you're a creative person who has ever doubted whether you have permission to make things — and let's be honest, that's all of us — this book is required listening. Five stars, no hesitation.

If You Liked How to Be an Artist, Try:

• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert — Another no-nonsense creative manifesto, this one focused on curiosity over fear as the engine for making things.

• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield — A more combative take on creative resistance, treating the blank page like a battlefield (in a good way).

  
  

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