Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career Author: Visit Amazon's Elizabeth Hyde Stevens Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1477817387 | Format: EPUB
Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career Description
About the Author
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens created the Muppets, Mickey, and Money research course at Boston University. Her analysis of Jim Henson’s career has appeared online at The Awl, The Millions, Electric Literature, and Rolling Stone. In 2011, her essay “Weekend at Kermie’s” was viewed over 160,000 times. Called “a long, brilliant thinkpiece" on Twitter, it was praised by Internet curators Brain Pickings, Mother Jones, Longreads, Longform, Wired, IMDB, IFC, Reader’s Digest, and Kurt Loder. Stevens attended public school in North Andover, Massachusetts, and went on to study art semiotics at Brown University and creative writing at the Brooklyn College MFA program. She is a member of the Brooklyn writers’ collective The Kilgore Trout Home for Wayward Writers and teaches fiction at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has earned the Himan Brown Award and the Somerville Arts Council Fellowship for Literature. Everything she knows about business she learned from watching Sesame Street.
- Paperback: 468 pages
- Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (March 11, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1477817387
- ISBN-13: 978-1477817384
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
One of the true joys of readership is encountering a genre totally anew--especially a familiar or an underestimated one. In Make Art Make Money, Elizabeth Stevens delivers a virtuosic double punch: She provides a biography-driven history of Jim Henson's rise to eminency among American wonder-makers in the 1970s, and she reinvents the "self-help" book beautifully. Make Art Make Money is a delightful Muppet-fest disguised as a smart book about the gritty how-tos of the business of art.
Stevens's voice remains funny without edging into manic hero worship. Her take on Henson's genius is perfectly in tune with our time, somehow never sacrificing history for glibness. This makes the fact that hers is, in many ways, a book about how her hipster/Great-Recession generation can succeed in the business world all the more surprising and enjoying. Via Henson, history becomes fun (and fuzzy); business becomes less intimidating and more creative: Stevens tells us she is offering "ten Muppety lessons" on how to make a buck without sacrificing that aspect of art that makes it art--its quality of gift.
Surely, many artists and businesspeople would benefit from meditating upon Kermit for a few hours, but this book will strike a particular chord with those writers, painters, sculptors, designers, puppeteers, etc. who essentially don't want to make money, who view money as a sign of diminishing creative returns.
For them especially, Stevens's careful investigation of Henson's leaps from plateau to plateau (commercial toil, nonprofit success, toy production, brand empire, Hollywood) will entail a convincing counter-narrative: Some artist is going to sell your kids toys. Some artist is going to design children's shows.
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