Should a visual artist be required to write a commentary about her work?  Is a writer required to draw a picture?  The problem with artist statements, apart from the many hours that the artist is taken away from her art, is the problem    of ekphrasis (to borrow a term).  The artist statement is an invitation to misrepresent oneself.

This website itself is a cut-and-paste collection of textual elements extracted from a very thick file of artist statements, commentary, project proposals, and other miscellaneous text-based debris that seems to have a attached itself to the artist.