VSG Magazine
Books & Ideas
This section invites recommendations and reflections on books, texts, or ideas that have influenced artistic thinking. By sharing what we read and think about, we connect our individual practices to wider worlds of knowledge and imagination.
Books shape how we see. Here we share what we're reading — not reviews, but honest encounters with books that have changed how we think about making, being, and existing as artists in the world.
A gorgeous, wide-ranging survey of how animals have appeared in human art from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary work. Each era reveals something different about our relationship with the non-human world — reverence, fear, utility, tenderness. More than a history of images, it reads as a history of human attention. Beautifully produced and endlessly browsable.
A practical, honest guide to building a sustainable art career — written not by an institution but by an artist who figured it out. Carey covers everything from grants and galleries to building relationships with collectors and the press, without the usual mystification. What makes it useful is that it treats the business of art as a learnable skill, not a secret. Recommended for anyone who makes work they believe in and wants more people to see it.
Part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series — each volume gathers artists' writings, interviews, and critical texts around a single theme. This one focuses on the ocean: as subject, as metaphor, as ecological crisis, as spiritual force. Artists and writers from across decades and disciplines contribute. An ideal companion volume to The Water Calls To Us, and to anyone whose practice touches on water, environment, or the non-human.
Not just for theatre artists. Barba and Savarese's monumental study of the performer's body across cultures — Noh, Balinese dance, commedia dell'arte, ballet, Peking opera — reveals the universal techniques underlying presence, energy, and decision. The question at the heart of the book: what happens in the body when a performer is truly alive on stage? Visual artists, dancers, and anyone interested in the body as artistic medium will find this extraordinary. An encyclopedia that reads like philosophy.
A short, quiet book about the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi — the beauty of imperfection, incompleteness, and impermanence. It is less a how-to and more a way of seeing: the cracked glaze, the weathered surface, the asymmetrical form. For artists working with process, materiality, and time, this book offers a philosophical anchor. Read it slowly. It will stay with you.