CC: What's the best thing about Cleveland? The Worst?
DD: The relative openness and acessibility of the Cleveland art community, which seems to have very little alienating attitude and superfluous hierarchy. The worst thing about Cleveland, for alot of its visual artists, is the sense that if one wants serious professional accomplishment, one has to seek validation from other cities/markets, or to physically move away. The lack of real professional consequences tends to limit the momentum that a local scene can generate, and this inhibits the development of an exciting local scene with its own vernacular. Hats off to those who try despite the odds, like Angle Magazine and Cool Cleveland.
CC: What does Cleveland have that no other place has?
DD: An incredibly dramatic range between its 'high' culture institutions and its failing, physically crumbling industrial past. A drive down Chester Ave. from my neighborhood to University Circle starts with a half-destroyed old brick factory building (that, until recently, sported a sign fragment reading only "nuts", oddly enough, as if the building were expressing its frustration about current conditions), and then ten minutes later eastward, you're in front of the fancy Museum pond. I can't say that this condition is totally unique to Cleveland, but its architectural juxtapositions and how they reflect history, economy, and class are striking.
CC: What does Cleveland have to do to make itself indispensable in the 21st Century?
DD: It probably has something to do with fiber optics and nanotechnology.
CC: What does Cleveland have to stop doing?
DD: Certain Cleveland storeowners have to make it less ambiguous as to whether their store is a) Open for Business or b) Condemned by the City. There are many of these up-for-guesses establishments, which adds intrigue to the city, but can't be good for attracting big venture capital.
CC: What has been your greatest contribution to this region?
DD: I hope that I have, as a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, helped educate some of the great future artists and designers, who will invest their future fans and coworkers-to-be with the impression that this region spawns aesthetic sensitivity and intellectualism. Hopefully, this kind of cultural export might make a dent in the (amazingly) enduring images of burning lakes and newer PR debacles like projectile-hurling football fans.
CC: What do you want to be remembered for when you're gone?
DD: Most publicly, for great paintings. Less publicly, for inspired and inspiring teaching. Most privately, for engaged, loving, honest intimacy.
CC: Cleveland is not a town that celebrates failures, but maybe it should. What was your biggest "failure" and what did you learn from it?
DD: When I went off to grad school, I wanted, as most insecure young artists, to be this precocious hotshot artist. It didn't work out that way (not even in the least), and by the end of my two years I knew it. I had to accept the fact that I had failed my ambitions, and I had to figure out how to keep going after that. In this instance, failing to receive the validation that I craved forced me to internalize my motivations, to keep working despite my doubt, without any foreseeable external rewards. Admitting failure releases you from the dread of failing, and reveals that you may have better, and more necessary, reasons than praise and validation for doing what you're doing. And if you don't have better reasons, then failing frees up your time to do something more fun or less difficult.
CC: Who do you look up to?
DD: The German painter Gerhard Richter, my old professor Dan Sutherland, and my girlfriend Christine.
CC: Do you have a motto?
DD: Not really, but when something looms on the horizon that I dread, I usually tell myself "it won't be as bad as high school". To this day, I've always been right.
CC: What's the best advice you've been offered.
DD: A friend of mine told me to "stop trying to be the artist that you want to be and be the artist that you are". Being intensely critical, I instantly dismissed this as nonsense: it seemed a prescription for low ambitions and blind self-acceptance. Over the years I realized that this advice is infact tailored for the intensely critical type, the sort that would reject intuitive impulses as baseless or indulgent...to be an artist, one has to be consistently ambitious while accepting that there may be unwilled, unwanted, even embarrassing or disreputable aspects of the self that prove to be the source of one's most interesting and best work. I'm still trying to take this advice.
CC: Where are you most likely to hang out in Cleveland?
DD: Cleveland Museums, either "of Art" or "of Contemporary Art, Spaces Gallery, or the Severance Cinema stadium seating.
CC: Least likely?
DD: Any place with the questionable words "Gentleman's", "Wild", or "Smackdown" in its name. (:divend:)