driving the doubts away

When art can become worth millions, making art can make you nervous.

Driving the Doubts Away presents Olof’s nervousness, doubts, and failures in art school.

We also meet him as a nervous altar boy, as a confused philosophy student, and as failed comedian.

We learn about the theory of jokes, why people don’t like performance art, about the sociology of the art world, and about the actual difference between high culture and low culture.

And we meet the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), who failed to get into art school, spent his early career doing comic drawings for cheap magazines, and who at the age of sixty-three still only owned one suit.

In 2004, Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) — a urinal on a pedestal — was voted the most influential art work of the 20th century.

In Driving the Doubts Away, Fountain stands as the centrifugal image of the mystery of art, and of Olof’s confusion in art school. 

To an artist, Fountain represents the freedom to create — art can be almost anything. 

While to an art investor, when a urinal becomes a million dollar art work — it’s the mystery of money for almost nothing.

But maybe Duchamp simply intended Fountain as a joke?

Driving the Doubts Away unfolds as a marvellous narrative clockwork full of surprise and insight; it’s philosophical, poetic, humorous, and dramatic.

Added to the drama of the story, is the drama of its presentation; the Olof on stage is as nervous as the Olof in the script, keeping the audience in suspense: how will he get away with this?

Driving the Doubts Away features 170 illustrations and five original songs.