Where Even Concrete Is Expensive, Artists Must Get Creative - Facts So Romantic
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The atmosphere in El Anatsui’s studio is somewhere between a Renaissance artist’s workshop and a recycling plant. The roof is made of thin, uninsulated metal sheets that offer little protection against the hot Nigerian weather. Bags overflowing with bottle tops, bought from local distilleries, are piled all over the floor. Around a dozen young men can be seen cutting, flattening, folding, punching, and tying together pieces of metal into small blocks, which Anatsui tests in different combinations until he is satisfied. The art made in this studio ends up all over the world. Works are held by MOMA and the Metropolitan Muesum of Art in New York, The Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the British Museum in London, among others. Anatsui, a 69-year-old, Ghanaian-born sculptor, is best known for (...)

NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
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Let’s talk about money. In his history of world art, E. H. Gombrich mentions a Renaissance artist whose uneven work was a puzzle, until art historians discovered some of his accounts and compared incomes with images: paid less he worked carelessly; well-remunerated he excelled. So, given the decreasing income of writers over recent years—one thinks of the sharp drop in payments for freelance journalism and again in advances for most novelists, partly to do with a stagnant market for books, partly to do with the liveliness and piracy of the Internet—are we to expect a corresponding falling off in the quality of what we read?