I was very interested in the state of mind of an artist as he or she goes about making. I think one of the things that artists have is not just an interest in their own subconscious, but also an ability to find ways, tricks, and hacks to access their subconscious. Over time, they understand how to make productive use of what they find there. We all have subconsciousness; we all dream and daydream. We all have disassociated thoughts that float through our head, but we don't generally know what to do with them. One of the traits that successful artists seem to have is this ability to cross borders into recesses of their own minds.
Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days. As editor of New York, he also oversaw the creation of five digital magazines: Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street, and The Strategist. During his tenure, New York won forty-one National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times with oversight of the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, as well as managing editor of Esquire. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019. He is the Author of The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Your book is called The Work of Art, but just looking at it, it's a visual experience; it's a work of art itself. It's more than a book on creativity in the way that it's laid out because half of it is images, and then you have your voice largely in the footnotes and introductions, along with the voices of the various artists. It has that flick factor as well, like a really beautiful magazine with the heft of a book, which makes it something you can return to. Tell us a little bit about the beginning of that process, the architecture, and the archaeology of the book.
ADAM MOSS
I've always been interested, as a human and as a journalist, in artifacts of the making of anything. I think that they are beautiful and extremely telling, providing a kind of map of the artist's mind as they create. They're very honest; they're not distorted by memory or the other sorts of things that come when people try to make sense of what they have done. I always love drafts of things, scribbles, doodles, crazy outlines, and lyric fragments on hotel stationery.
I just love all that stuff. So when I got the idea to do this book, I thought it would be especially interesting if I could find as many of these artifacts as were available to me, and basically present them to the artists as a way to prompt their remembering about how to do this thing and explain their thinking and state of mind.
I was very interested in the state of mind of an artist as he or she goes about making the thing. I've worked in magazines all my life. I'm really interested in the way that text interplays with images, and I always felt that books were a little antiquated in that regard. They had the quality you're describing, which is that they look kind of alike, and you have to hunt for the images, which might be grouped in the center. In any case, there’s a lack of dynamism. When I wanted to do this book, one of my interests was to create a book that didn't look like any other book. So, I worked with the designer and his team, whom I had worked with as a magazine editor, Luke Hayman and Pentagram. I charged them with the idea of making a book that would toggle easily between the imagery we were discussing and the words—my words and the words of the artists.
I wanted to create a form where I could talk, where the artists were given room to discuss what it is that they were doing. I established this elaborate, almost Talmudic footnote structure so that I could talk without getting in their way. I could comment on what they were discussing, while also weaving in my own thoughts, fears, doubts, and traces of my own memoir where relevant. Part of the book is also a search for understanding why I was having so much trouble learning how to paint.
I think one of the things that artists have is not just an interest in their own subconscious, but also an ability to find ways, tricks, and hacks to access their subconscious. Over time, they understand how to make productive use of what they find there. We all have subconsciousness; we all dream and daydream. We all have disassociated thoughts that float through our head, but we don't generally know what to do with them. One of the traits that successful artists seem to have is this ability to cross borders into recesses of their own minds.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In this book, you mentioned that you’ve just really found yourself as a writer. You have an illustrious career as an editor, but many editors make their way to editing through writing. Primarily, you focused on magazines as an art form—the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and won all these awards. This is your first book, as you've said. I really appreciate that it carries the energy of dialogue, as this seems very important about the creative process or the work of art; even if it's a lonely endeavor, you are having a conversation with yourself. There has to be that feeling of conversation; otherwise, it's a lonely work of art.
MOSS
Yes, absolutely. I kind of ran away from writing my entire career, mostly because I was terrified of the solitude. The little monsters that come out in your head when you're alone were things I tried to avoid. When I struggled with learning how to paint and searched for a book like this, it didn’t exist. I decided to write it. I was very scared because I was apprehensive about the writing process. I constructed the book in a way that would recreate a group process.
The artists would be my collaborators. I would talk to them, but then I would present their work in the same way I, as an editor, presented the work of writers. I intruded in a more transparent way than you can in a magazine. In the end, that worked out. I played all the roles: the interviewer, the composer of the various images. All the magazine parts, I did by myself, which was a very different experience for me.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I resonate with the desire to be inside someone's brain—not just to describe the work from the outside, but somehow to step into the mental and emotional space where it was created. Experiencing the work itself is already a step inside—like a glimpse into their inner world. But you're right; it's not quite enough. As much as our project is called The Creative Process, I rarely ask artists, "What’s your process?" because, as you noted, people can become self-conscious and freeze up. The process is so fluid, often subconscious, that putting it into words almost distorts it.
Instead, it tends to reveal itself more organically—through biography, interests, politics, and where they’re from. Through all that context, you begin to understand not just what they made, but why they made it. That helps you trace the creative logic back to its source. Still, we often don’t get deep enough into the process—it takes time, presence, and intimacy. You almost have to live alongside them, or, as you said, be invited in at those raw moments—like a therapist being told, "Call me when we’re in the middle of the argument." It’s rare, but when it happens, it’s incredibly revealing. Your book manages to create that closeness, that prolonged conversation, where the subconscious starts to speak.
MOSS
It’s a very hard thing to capture, even in a documentary. There was a kind of famous documentary that played a role in this book—Peter Jackson's reconstruction of the making of The Beatles' album Let It Be. There’s a very brief moment in the documentary where Paul McCartney is just riffing on the guitar, and you hear the first chords of the song "Get Back," which became a big number one hit. It’s amazing because you see the moment of emergence of a specific work that you know, and it feels miraculous. But, of course, it isn't miraculous. Nothing is really miraculous. Everything has a reason. Everything comes from somewhere. That was the project of the book.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's really interesting that moment when you're alone, or when time is just disappearing, or you're going into this kind of trance. I do highlight that even though I consider it not an equal balance, I see a number of the artists as both collective and interior artists, though I know more solo artists. You focused on that period where they were at the beginning of the project before they got their whole team together.
MOSS
Yeah. David Simon mentioned that something happens by itself, and then it is subject to a completely other inquiry. In David Simon's case, there's this wonderful phrase called "the Bounce," which is how creativity works. If you think of it better, it’s like a ball bouncing among a group. It bounces from one person to another, and then they bounce it back, achieving more velocity when more hands are on it. The bounce has a life of its own. I absolutely relate to that as a creator. The bounce in one's own brain can be the trickiest aspect. I could have written a whole book about collaboration.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Tell us about how you began in editing, your mentors along the way, and how you knew that this was a place for you.
MOSS
When I was growing up, I didn’t know what an editor was. There were no models for that, but I was extremely attracted to the magazine form when I was a kid. I lived in the suburbs, and the magazines were my ticket to the sophistication of adult city life. I would immerse myself in them as a very young child and became attached to them as a portal to a world I wanted to belong to.
When I graduated from college, I tried to find a job in magazines and, through various happenstances, managed to get one. Of course, I tried to be a writer like everyone does because that seems to be the only option. I suffered for it; I was lonely, and I wasn’t very good at just playing with myself, as it were. I noticed that there were many people doing something much more interesting: they were working behind the scenes, imposing their ideas on this periodical form, creating something that appeared, then appeared, and then appeared again. It reminded me of the kindergarten projects I had done as a child, and it seemed fun.
Once I transitioned to being a young editor, I learned how creative those positions can be. You develop ideas, find the right people to execute them, and figure out how to tell the story. As the head editor, you establish the magazine's personality; you are the guiding spirit. That was something I aspired to, and I became passionate about it. It was the last great era of print when I was coming up in magazines. As soon as it became digital and I saw its future, I became entranced with the possibilities of digital journalism. Those possibilities seemed just as creative to me.
In the last part of my career, I focused on translating the values of print magazines into the world of animation, sound, graphic, and interactive storytelling. I was very lucky to have been a magazine editor and to have traversed these two eras over the last several decades. I find myself interested in all the things journalism becomes on its way to the next thing. Of course, the world we live in is very challenging. Journalism is not the answer to our challenges, but it's helpful as a tool. However, something much more seriously complicated is going on.
MOSS
Every story in my book is different. Everyone has a different way of doing things. But there is one thing, and there are several things that were in common. One of those things was the main action: to simplify. The main action was to make the complicated simple. What comes out of your head is just a big mess, and the work is very much figuring out the simplest version of that. That's what makes the work so powerful: you're able to find the clear in the complicated.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yeah, you flick through all the wave bands, and then you get the clear signal. I did want to ask you as well, because you're talking about things born of necessity or things like having deadlines with magazines. Can you tell us about those times when you just had to go to print and the momentum of a project that made something happen because you had no choice?
MOSS
When I was working at the Times and the Times Magazine, on one Tuesday morning, the towers fell. September 11, 2001. The magazine had a 10-day lead time, so it was a weekly that was essentially 10 days old by the time it came out. We came to work and realized the world had changed, and the entire process, the magazine had been made for over a hundred years, had to be thrown out the window. We had to create a new magazine in 36 hours that would in some way speak to this very different, scary, and interesting world we were now in.
In those 36 hours, we usually would take months to produce a magazine. If you take all of its aspects, it’s a long journey. However, we made a magazine in 36 hours that, in some ways, was the best magazine I ever made because of the urgency of the moment.
We made a particular set of decisions; we decided to focus just on this day and what happened that day. That was a fantastic limit, and we brought in all the talent we'd been assembling over the years. They were all in their own states of agitation, which also stimulated their creativity. They were able to create these pieces overnight that we then worked into a kind of tapestry magazine, with observations, impressions, and sensory experiences that were enhanced by the incredible photography we had assembled. On the cover of the magazine, we found a memorial that came into being called The Towers of Light, which was imagined in the last 24 hours. I will say that the magazine, out of circumstance and constraint, and in this supercharged condition, became as close to a perfect magazine form as I've ever been associated with in my career.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, I remember it very well, and it had that rawness, the vulnerability you're talking about and beautiful images that spoke to us, conveying a sense of dignity. There are video images, but sometimes you really have to hold still the image to understand. It was significant to have a memorial in the magazine at that time. All the more beautiful because it was spontaneous.
Magazines are so visual, but what drew you to painting? What led you to go into painting after being so focused on words?
MOSS
One day, I decided, without any background in art, to take advantage of the ghosts and paint. I started painting a painting a day, and it was a humbling learning experience, but I really enjoyed it. I returned to New York and decided to paint more seriously, although I still had this job as an editor, which was more than a full-time commitment. I finally quit my job to try painting full-time, or kind of full-time, until I wrote this book.
As you noted, I procrastinated. That's how I got into painting. I eventually took classes and received skills training. But, fundamentally, I found the act of putting paint on canvas to be enormously satisfying, even if I haven’t been particularly good at it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Well, you say you were not very good at it, but you’re still painting?
MOSS
I am still painting, and I still don’t consider myself very good at it. One of the things the book taught me is that nobody is fully satisfied with anything they do. I encountered a refrain in my conversations with artists where I would ask them to exalt in the making of what we had just discussed. I kind of wanted a happy ending, a sense of, "Oh my God, I figured it out!" But I never got that sense of closure, epiphany, or catharsis in the making of the work. What I found was that the next day was just fine, and I returned to work. What truly consumed me was the process of making, not the finished product.
I resisted this realization for a long time, but I eventually found it liberating. I go into the painting studio and find the act of making deeply moving, so much so that I care less about what I have made and more about the process of creating it. Each story in my book is different; everyone has a different way of doing things. One commonality among them is that the main action is to simplify. The goal is to make the complicated simple. What comes out of your head is often a big mess, and the work involves figuring out the simplest version of that. That simplification is what makes the work powerful; it embodies the clarity within the complexity.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What are your thoughts on the future—generally the future of education? The kind of education you experienced in magazines and journalism isn't available in the same way now. Who were those important mentors for you, and what would you like young people to preserve and remember?
MOSS
I feel just as scared and discouraged as many young people do right now, so I'm not in a position to offer hope. However, I do believe in human resilience, and because of my education, I have some sense of history. We have lived through very scary periods in human history—scarier than this one—and we have survived. I must hope we will again.
It is challenging, and the only one thing I would say to young people is that they must know the past. They need to take some time to understand what got us here. I believe this awareness would make them take less for granted about the world that has been built. While it has many problems, it is largely a story of progress. Many young people I know don’t appreciate this; it’s not their fault, but the education system has failed them. They only see what is awful about our present, which I understand. However, it's also in many ways a wonderful story, and they should know it—both to feel hope and understand what they are fighting for.
