This episode of The Art Assignment is supported by Prudential.

Hello, friends. Happy New Year, and sorry about the clickbait-y title.

We're still gonna be making new videos, but we're gonna be switching gears a bit. I will explain. Next week, we will release our 58th art assignment.

When we released our first assignment in February of 2014,. I had no idea we'd still be at it three years later. I have had the amazing privilege of visiting artists from all over the country and world, and it's been a true pleasure to spend time with them, coming up with assignments for you guys.

And it's been an even greater pleasure to see you all respond to these artists and their assignments. Every time I see one of you tag something you've made with #TheArtAssignment, it feels like a miracle to me that this digital experience can yield a physical thing that is now out in the world, and that these prompts have led you to have experiences you never would have otherwise. But there are now so many assignments.

It was never the goal of this series for you to do every single one of them, and that's why we've never had any due dates or any expectations around how or when they're completed. But they are all there for you and for students and for teachers, and will be for the foreseeable future. You can still meet in the middle.

You can still articulate something you've never seen and probably never will. You can still walk on it. You can sort books, conjure a studio, and measure histories.

You can still become someone else or host a scrabble scramble dinner. You can still have empathy for an object, construct a landscape, or copy a copy a copy. They're all still there for you to return to whenever you'd like.

We have three more assignments that we're gonna release over the next month, and they're really great ones, but after that we're going on assignment hiatus. We're still gonna be releasing new videos, but they're gonna be more Case For videos, a few art trips, and a variety of others that address ideas and questions about art and art history. I know, I know.

How can we still call this series The Art Assignment when we aren't gonna be giving out any art assignments? But the thing is, the mission of this series has always been to talk about art and art history through the lens of what's happening today. We've been doing this by introducing you to working artists, having them give you assignments, and linking those activities to things that have been done in the past.

But we've also been doing this through exploring common questions about art and offering explanations for why you should take a particular artist or movement or type of art seriously. The field of art is incredibly broad and diverse, and I feel like it takes a wide range of videos and formats to even begin to cover it. We'll also be releasing videos just twice a month after February because those Case For videos are a lot of work, and we wanna focus on doing less better, which I think is a worthy goal for anyone inhabiting this strange internet-verse.

And when we're not making new Case For videos, we're gonna be developing an Art Assignment book that gathers together into one sweet, fat compendium all 60 existing assignments with lots of additional reading material and images of works made in response. It's gonna be amazing, and if I talk about it in public, it has to happen, right? If you love doing assignments, don't fret.

You can still do them. We will still be looking out for what you make and featuring responses on social media, on our website, in videos, and possibly even our forthcoming book. And remember that you can always make an artwork in response to a video even if we're not explicitly asking you to.

I'm also kickstarting a kind of work group in response to a video even if we're not explicitly asking you to. I'm also kickstarting a kind of work group for those of you who, like me, haven't done as many assignments as they'd like and need a good excuse and deadlines and accountability to get anything done. If you'd like to participate and help me figure out what this group is gonna look like, click the link in the description and fill out a quick survey for me.

Then we can figure out how often we wanna do assignments together, which assignments we wanna do, how we wanna talk about them, and how we'd like to structure the group. I would love it if you'd join me. I'd like to conclude with some helpful hints for students and teachers from John Cage, an artist we've talked about often on this show.

Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes.

Read everything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully and often. Save everything, it may come in handy later.

Now, mind you, I'm not the teacher and you're not the students in this scenario. I'd like to think that we're all both at the same time, and that's what makes The Art Assignment continue to happen. So thanks for watching and for being part of this magnificent experiment in how we can learn and talk about art on the internet.

See ya next week. Thanks to Prudential for sponsoring this episode. We all want our future to be secure, but studies have shown that people have a tendency to place a higher value on immediate rewards than future rewards.

In terms of our finances, most Americans only focus on the financial needs of today. Go to Prudential.com/SAVEMORE to learn about how you can better plan for tomorrow and maintain your current standard of living in retirement. (light upbeat music).