![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/gapingvoid_successful1003-sm.jpg?resize=500%2C425&ssl=1\" "\\"'Successful,'")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn a recent blog post<\/a>, loyal friend of RAMH<\/em> Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.*<\/p>\n I no longer have any\u00a0idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output while still suffocating in a day job. He’d started up an e-newsletter, and in each issue he included — free of charge — a sample of one of his special projects. That special project was the creation of drawings (“cartoons”? eeehhhh… maybe<\/em>) which he’d doodled on the backs of business cards. Some of the drawings were quite dark in tone; some were laugh-out-loud funny; some just made me uncomfortable with how much they made me think<\/em>.<\/p>\n Ultimately, I unsubscribed from the Gaping Void newsletter, as MacLeod called it. Not because it had ceased to be interesting, even valuable or important. No, simply because I was saving every single issue, with all the others, in a separate GapingVoid email folder. The computer I had at the time had begun to wheeze with overload and I started to throw things overboard: MP3s, images, software… Gaping Void.<\/p>\n And then I forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when I read Froog’s post, and shortly learned that MacLeod is making \u00a0a living doing what he wants to do<\/em>. Crazy, huh?<\/p>\n If you want, feel free (of course!) to explore what is now MacLeod’s Gaping Void<\/a><\/em> blog<\/a>. But by all means (as Froog suggested) do stop over at the Lateral Action<\/em> site for a terrific brief\u00a0interview<\/a> with MacLeod, in part on the topic of getting your art — dare I say writing? — in front of people who will want it for themselves.<\/p>\n Excerpt:<\/p>\n “Artists cannot market” is complete crap. Warhol was GREAT at marketing. As was Picasso and countless other “Blue Chips”. Of course, they’d often take the “anti-marketing” stance as a form of marketing themselves. And their patrons lapped it up.<\/p>\n The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.<\/p>\n The worst thing an artist can do is see marketing as “The Other”, i.e. something outside of themselves. It’s not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So: what’s your myth — your “great story” about your story<\/em>? * The “cartoonist” is MacLeod’s preferred term, rather than “artist.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.* I no longer have any\u00a0idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,94,250,274,37,5,209],"tags":[331,1682,1683,1684],"class_list":{"0":"post-7026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-02_in-the-news","8":"category-art","9":"category-cartoons","10":"category-onlineworld","11":"category-06_writing","12":"category-the-business","13":"tag-froog","14":"tag-gaping-void","15":"tag-hugh-macleod","16":"tag-art-and-commerce","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1Pk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7026"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7031,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7026\/revisions\/7031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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