How To Art

2021 – Zine 

How To Art is a satirical piece about the institutionalization and sterilization of one’s art practice through the fear of losing meaning, relevance, and control.

Petros Lales is framed in the piece as a “Master Arter” who prescribes a rigid methodology for artistic creation through six ostensibly simple steps. The text operates through metaphor and symbolic instruction, presenting creative practice as a controlled sequence rather than an open-ended or intuitive process. This structured framework is deliberately stylized as meditative discipline, suggesting a system that attempts to quarantine artistic production from instability, ambiguity, or excess.

The work critically examines how cultural and academic systems turn creativity into standardized procedures to maintain funding, relevance, and authority, ultimately reducing artistic practice to a controlled and managed protocol.