The Art Angle Podcast: YouTube’s No-Nonsense Art Guru on How to Unlock Your Inner Artist

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

How many times have you heard someone in a museum scoff “I could
do that” in the presence of a solid-black canvas or an obtuse
conceptual installation? You’re not alone, and frankly,
curator-turned-YouTube-star Sarah Urist Green understands the
disconnect between art enthusiasts and art skeptics. But she wants
to fix it by guiding all of us, from truck drivers to art
historians, into tapping our own inner wells of creativity using
the biggest video platform on the planet.

After grad school and a curatorship at the former Indianapolis
Museum of Art (renamed Newfields in 2017), Urist Green was
well-versed in the ins and outs of the contemporary-art scene. But
she eventually began to tire of the insular world built up around
the work itself and longed for a way to expand art’s audience. When
her husband, the novelist John Green, mentioned off-hand that PBS
was developing new educational programming, she took the plunge and
pitched a show called “The
Art Assignment” centered on projects designed by avant-garde
artists that everyone, everywhere could complete themselves. Now a
weekly digital web series, the YouTube fixture has some 500,000
subscribers, and it has branched out from its core concept to
include travel episodes, art-history-themed cooking lessons, and
much more.

After six years helming the wildly popular series, Green
published her first book, You Are an Artist: Assignments to Spark
Creation, in late March, just as millions of people around
the world were being forced to retreat indoors for weeks on end.
The timing was uncanny. Born out of her YouTube series, the book is
brimming with projects dreamed up by such critically acclaimed
talents as Alec Soth, Michelle Grabner, and the Guerrilla
Girls—each one engineered to be feasible from home with the
materials available. It’s a perfect solution for our long days of
sheltering in place.

On this week’s episode, Urist Green joins Andrew Goldstein by
phone to discuss her unexpected art-world journey, the
serendipitous appeal of her new book, and how you—yes, you—can be
an artist, too.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)

Listen to Other Episodes:

The Art Angle Podcast: How Marina Abramović
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The Art Angle Podcast: The New Yorker’s Peter
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Critic

The Art Angle Podcast: Ai Weiwei on the
Coronavirus, China, and Art’s New Role

The Art Angle Podcast: How Photography Is Being
Revolutionized in the Coronavirus Era

The Art Angle Podcast: Why Germany’s COVID-19
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The Art Angle Podcast: The Unbelievable True Story
of the Mystical Painter Agnes Pelton

The Art Angle Podcast:
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The Art Angle Podcast: Why Art and Fashion Need
Each Other Now

The Art Angle Podcast: What Does an Art Scene Look
Like Under the Coronavirus?

The Art Angle Podcast: How an Art-Dealing Prodigy
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Guru on How to Unlock Your Inner Artist appeared first on
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