Developing Internal Standards with The Handyman of High Art

Originally Published June 7, 2022

Have you ever wondered why dads look like birthday boys in a toy store whenever they visit a home depot? The sculptor and filmmaker named Tom Sachs went a little overboard with his bricolage creations. When I say a little, I mean he created his own Prada toilet, Hermes hand grenades, Chanel guillotine, NASA space program, and his own McDonald’s. Although his fans-turned-friends include personalities like Adam Savage, Casey Neistat, and Gary Vaynerchuk, his humble beginnings extend back to being a janitor and repairman trying to make ends meet. After making his colleagues look bad as he did too much designing for their company building, his employer hired him full-time to decorate the office. It took him 30 years to get paid to make art. Now, his revered works are being demonstrated from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Pompidou Center in Paris. This is probably the reason why he treats his audience at the same level as his.

His version of contemporary art circles around pop culture and consumerism with a belief that beauty, has to have a utility. It is like an intellectual jihad between functionalism and art. He argues that art is done for how it is done and not for museums or art collectors. It’s a way of looking at the world not the way it is but the way he wants it to be.

One of his newest multidimensional crafts is an NFT with 3,000 pieces. This allows users to build their own mini-rockets with different brands and launch them in space. It belongs to the very few exceptions of non-fungible tokens that are actually not terrible as it encourages its community to participate and contribute. Plus, their Six Sigma rocket factory makes sure that the rockets don’t go to waste as they get recovered after being launched.

Tom knows that the reward for good work is more work but not everything needs to be overtaught, sometimes you just need to trust your gut. Do it fast, do it wrong, and do it again. He proves that shelling out is the key to success. You don’t have to do 100 push-ups because you have to but because you get to. Tom mentioned that if the bad guys don't take a day off, why should he? Output before input but do the task before you improvise. Any 2 things in the world are connected by a 3rd one and finding that 3rd one is the hardest.

Tom thought that people are looking for life outside the planet because we don't fully understand why it started. To his surprise, the best technical people who are working as scientists and engineers at NASA are extremely philosophical. If you would look up Sachs’ Crest, it shows his ingrained Internal Standards which include authenticity, intuition, and transparency. Completing an artwork is a question of character and will not skills. You have to be honest with all your methods. You might just need to make the right "wrong" decision. There is no bad color, only bad application. Tom’s complex yet intimate style is composed of these.

He believes that everyone is a young artist inside regardless of age. Sadly, money is an illusion by which we all live and die. So would you rather get paid well doing things that you don't want to do? Because when you love what you do, it doesn't matter if you get paid or not. This is the importance of a drawing board, notes and sketches could only take seconds or minutes to finish but materializing them could take a lifetime. When creating, Tom reminds us of 3 cornerstones: how it looks: Design, how it works: Utility, and how it impacts: Community. I vouch that his crown jewel is that his fingerprints are everywhere. Not because everybody knows him but because he's using the art and beauty of almost everything that we take for granted. Get out of that creative rut! You can check out Tom’s boring sneaker collaboration with Nike called General Purpose Shoes (GPS).

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