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> Just wanted to point out that I posted on r/Art early this morning and they were surprisingly unhelpful.

No surprise there.

I recommend you buy a copy of Art/Work as soon as possible. It looks like you could even download a digital copy of it tonight for $4. It's a good primer for writing resumes, bios, and all the other professional aspects to the art market.

Many artists learn rigorous rules about their medium and how they perceive 3-d space. If they want to sculpt marble, they need to know how the marble will respond to their chisel before they can create the shape they want, for example, or they need to know how light hits an object IRL before they can create the illusion of moving muscle in a 3-d character animation or an oil painting. Once they have an intimate understanding of these parameters, they can mess with them seeing how far they can break them in ways that bring about new ideas and visuals. This particular play is restrictive. Musicians do this as well as dancers and writers. Childlike play seems to skip the learning of rigorous rules...(or rather leads to it. ???) Other artists, those who work in conceptual art and similar, do seem to play, although they have other sets of knowledge they cull from such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, biology or whatever.

>playful, free manipulation of ideas and rules.

A Book of Surrealist Games

It really depends on what she is interested in, it is a very broad subject. Here are some of the better things I've read in the past few years, trying to make up for a lack of art education in school:

History of Modern Art

Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas

Color in Contemporary Painting: Integrating Practice and Theory

After Modern Art 1945-2000

Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction

Modern Sculpture: A Concise History

Sculpture since 1945

The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers

Aesthetics

The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Got to recommend:
House of Leaves, Mezzanine and Nadja. The Raw Shark Texts, Astronomical

Chaos Territory Art by Elizabeth Grosz.