Making It

What Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential did for the world of chefs and restaurants, Making It does for the art world.

Making It is a gonzo memoir of an established artist crossed with objective advice, tips and tricks fleshed out by a best-selling art historian and Pulitzer finalist writer on art. It peels back the shroud and reveals the highs and struggles in the life and career of a working artist.

Specifically aimed at aspiring artists and art students, it will be of interest to anyone who wants to know what it is like to have an artist's-eye-view of the art world, asking the tough and often glossed-over questions that rising artists inevitably have, not only about the creative process, but about navigating the turbulent waters of the social, professional, academic, critical, museum and trade elements of a career as a visual artist.

How best to deal with the abundance of alcohol, drugs and sex while wire-walking your own artistic dilemmas? How can an artist launch his or her career and help it flourish? What's it like to achieve every artist's dream, including showing at the Venice Biennale? What does it really mean to "make it" and how can you maintain your groove once you've arrived?

All these questions and more are answered in this combination tell-all memoir and how-to manual for rising artists and anyone wanting a behind-the-scenes tour of what it's like to be an artist.

About the Authors

JASA (Jasa Mrevlje-Pollak) is one of the most prolific and influential contemporary European visual artists of his generation. He trained at the Academy in Venice (Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia), where he graduated in 2004 with distinction and where he continues to teach. He has been featured in numerous publications, including Modern Painters, The Art Newspaper and Art in America. Based in Ljubljana and New York, his work has been exhibited around the world, including at Frieze London and New York and at the Venice Biennale.

Dr Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art , which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana. He writes regularly for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer and The Art Newspaper.