An Unsolicited Manual for Surviving Artists
An Unsolicited Manual for Surviving Artists
There is a little book that, for a very long time, was not a book.
In 2013, I wrote a very long post in Italian titled “Artisti, arte, frecce di Kama e altro” — Artists, Art, Kama’s Arrows, and Other Things. It was excessive, restless, sincere, probably undisciplined, and certainly too long for any civilized reader with a normal life.
But inside that text there was something I never stopped recognizing: a fire, a pressure, a question that kept returning.
What is an artist, really?
Why do we create?
What connects lack, desire, beauty, imagination, and reality?
And why do some images feel alive while others, even when beautiful, leave nothing behind?
That text stayed there for years.
Not dead.
Not finished.
Waiting for another form.
Only now, with the help of AI, have I been able to turn it into a small book in English:
An Unsolicited Manual for Surviving Artists
Notes on Vision, Damage, Beauty, and Refusing to Become Harmless
This is not a literal translation of the 2013 text. That would have been the most obedient choice, and therefore the least interesting one.
It is a rewriting. A reincarnation. A more controlled, sharper, more disciplined version of the same original pressure.
AI helped me with language, structure, rhythm, and distance. But the vision, the obsession, the subjective trouble, the metaphysical irritation, and the refusal of cheap, flat objectivity are mine. For better or worse.
This book begins from a simple conviction:
An artist does not create because the world is complete.
An artist creates because something is missing.
A version of reality that resonates with one’s subjective perception is missing.
For me, art is not decoration. It is not content. It is not a beautiful surface arranged for approval.
An image, a photograph, an object, a sentence, a sound must do something to reality. It must modify it, crack it open, re-harmonize it, make it slightly less false.
That is what this book is about.
It is about the abnormally sensitive mind.
About lack and desire.
About the subjective as the key.
About objectivity as the flattest, cheapest, most pre-packaged version of reality.
About photography as a story that continues outside the frame.
About beautiful garbage: art-trash that looks good, behaves well, and carries nothing.
About imagination not as escape, but as a force capable of bringing another reality into matter.
About surviving the pressure to become harmless.
This is not a manual for becoming an artist.
That would be indecent. The world is already full of instructions for things that cannot be acquired by following instructions.
It is closer to a testimony. Maybe a small testament. A way of leaving behind a vision and handing it to other anomalous minds: to those who have always felt that the common version of reality was too narrow, too poor, too polite, too already decided.
You can download the ePub for free here:
Download An Unsolicited Manual for Surviving Artists
I hope it can be useful to anyone who still feels the need to create images, words, objects, sounds, or visions that do not merely please, but move something.
Even slightly.
Sometimes a small shift is enough to make a room less false.
Andrea Bigiarini
May 15, 2026