Nerdiness = Hyperwhiteness?

With nerd culture seemingly on the rise in pop culture (tv series, current and upcoming feature films, etc.), a scholar looks at the roots of nerdiness.

From the NY Times, click here for story.

I just want to be loved

The Great Happiness Space - Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (2006) is a documentary on the lives of "host club" workers in Japan -- attractive 20-something guys who are paid to make women feel loved, not sexually, but as in to feel cared for. The entire film is available for free on-line viewing on Google video.

Screw self-pity; Enjoy This Instead

Lately life just appears to bring one adversity after another, reminders not to take anything for granted (but I'm having trouble listening).

What does this have to do with art? Maybe nothing but at this point, who cares?

In the face of reigning self-pity, there is a light of joy: Filipino prison inmates do Thriller en masse.

Having a Cow over Homer

(click on image for story)

Oops! No more expandable posts

Sorry, something got screwed up w/the HTML template so the expandable post option no longer works, and the new Help instructions are different, so I don't know how to fix it . . .

A-I-R: the next step?

I think I'll apply to an artist residency at the end of the year/new year, starting to feel like a natural next step towards becoming a professional artist. It's less investment and commitment than grad school, yet can still provide an ideal environment and community for productive process. Do they award them to non-degreed artists, or those w/o MFAs? I intend to find out, starting locally. Here are links to A-I-R databases, national and global:

http://www.artistcommunities.org/
http://www.resartis.org/
http://www.transartists.nl/

Bejewelled Skull Art prank

Last month, artist Damien Hirst unveiled the most expensive contemporary artwork ever made, a skull bedazzled with more than 8,000 fine diamonds. It's expected to sell for as much as $100 million. In response to the skull's exhibition at London's White Cube Gallery in Mason's Yard, an artist named Laura created a replica covered with 6,522 Swarovski crystals and dumped it outside the gallery in the middle of the night on top of a pile of trash.

Revelling in a contemplation of impotence

With no prior planning, he starts and develops his complex compositions on canvas. He told an interviewer, “I understand myself to be a director of plays.” The plays, such as they are, emerge in the process. . .

In terms of narrative content, the work is maddeningly coy—unless you fancy Jungian woolgathering about archetypes and suchlike—but it is so well designed and painted that, once you have started looking, resistance gives way. . .

Rauch tends to use oils as if they were poster paints, flatly—often scumbling, rather than glazing or blending, to modulate tones and colors. The result is a surreptitious richness. The rhetorical potency of oils—sensuous texture, light-drinking color, infinite suggestiveness—strains at a short, taut leash. The constrictive effect strikes me as perverse, but it is certainly original. It also anchors Rauch’s importance as an artist of and for the historical imbroglio of art today. . .

Rauch’s work provides a cultural moment that seeks legitimacy in art with talismans of rhapsodic complacency.

The surprise is that worry-proof conservatism can generate real artistic force. It does so, in Rauch’s art, by finding opportunities, in trumped-up fantasy, for recovering traditional aesthetic capacities of painting. Having nothing to say, he says it ever more marvellously. . .

The more observant you are of erudite allusions in the show (some male figures display particular airs and dress styles of nineteenth-century German Romanticism), the more acute will be your frustration in trying to make sense of it all. If Rauch’s work is nightmarish, as some critics have asserted, the effect pertains not to its dramas but to their mockery of understanding. They are not mysterious, because mysteries imply solutions. Rather, they convey that we may know plenty but our knowledge is useless. There is a highly contemporary sting in this. Today, we are flooded with accurate information—letting us confidently judge the failures and iniquities of political leaders, for instance—and we naturally feel that such clarity must influence events, but it only amplifies our dismay as the world careers from one readily foreseeable disaster to another. Rauch sets us an example of getting used to it. . .

But I think I’ve never seen an excellent painting that is so masochistically cheerless, to the point of revelling in a contemplation of impotence. I would like to despise the artist for this, but his visual poetry is too persuasive. Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were.

Peter Schjeldahl on Neo Rauch at the Met, in the New Yorker June 4, 2007.

Jazz Wisdom, via novelist

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
--Haruki Murakami, in the NY Times 7/8/07

Peko-chan Obsession?

Just a couple of entertaining links on a subject that's included in my latest exhibition:

Scandal Wipes Smile from "Peko-chan's" Face

They steal Fujiya Peko chan dolls

Post-Opening Syndrome: Symptoms, Treatment?

In the week and a half since a group show I'm in opened, I've experienced

depression
self-loathing
extreme craving for recognition, praise, accolades
consumption by vanity

all of which put me at risk for behaviors that had nothing to do with making good, honest art, and everything to do with ego-centrism. With that driving force, I did discover a couple of resources for artists obsessed with their own so-called "success" . . .

1. Reconnaissance: Google Alerts -- you can have Google scour the web, news, blogs, and groups, to keep you informed on a daily basis via e-mail of any postings with YOUR NAME or any other search terms you wish (e.g. show or gallery name, etc.). This way you don't have to keep obsessively googling your name to see if anyone likes you. (Actually a useful tool to yourself keep posted on developments in subjects of interest in your work).

2. Free promo? Gawker.com -- if you have a sample jpg of your work, brief bio/statement, and a website to refer to, it looks like these folks will do random free promotion of you and your work. You have to submit a proposal, but from a brief glance, looks like a range of artists at various levels of development. (Now, to get a website . . . but is that a good use of a true artist's time? I mean neither Michael Arcega nor Daniel Joseph Martinez have websites . . .).

Would you make it if you couldn't show it?

"The way to go in the art world is to get an MFA or drop out of high school," he said. "Even better, drop out of junior high." Daws not only graduated from high school, he went to college for a semester before coming to his senses. In school, he was a painter. One day in class, students considered the following question: If someone offered to pay them a decent living to make art under the sole condition that they never show it, would they take the deal?

"I was the only person who raised my hand," he said. "I loved the process of painting. What happens to the paintings interested me less. The work I'm doing now I wouldn't do if I couldn't show it to people. I'd leave it at the level of ideas, because fabrication is a pain in the ass."

From The Pennies of Jack Daws

Street Splasher: Proof that Art Still Matters?

From the NY Times, the saga continues.

They've made the entire 16-page manifesto available on the web, well worth checking out.

From what I've read so far, the splashers are no dummies when it comes to art and culture, but seem gravely misguided in how they are directing their well-developed creative sensibilities, in my humble opinion.

I'm all for interventional acts of resistance, but in this case, it's all mired in reactionary hatred and cynicism, which the world already has too much of, and is too easy a trap to fall into, instead of acknowledging the formidable challenges of actually showing up and making your own art, and finding a way to survive and still maintain a productive creative practice.

In that sense, the splashers' destructive, violent acts strike me as mere self-absorbed, misplaced anger and frustration. Instead of doing the internal work on themselves that would enable them to rise above their own envy and resentment to create honest work with the potential to transform individuals and civil society, through an engaging aesthetics of both ideas and form, they lash out at the world and the art around them.

Where's the value in that? Where's the honesty and vulnerability? Where is the art in their intervention? And where is the accountability for their actions?

This critic offers another take: proof that art still matters.

Maggots are your Friends

Yea! I really wanna play with the maggots and give them hugs. Unless you are cremated, they will be your friends too!

http://maggotart.com/about.cfm

Painter of the Moment? Neo Rauch at the Met

Click on image to go to NY Times review.

"I like to sing Blue Velvet"

Wish I could see this: art inspired by my favorite movie

The Splasher Caught: Stinkbomb for Shepard Fairey

A self-appointed group of critics/vandals has been splashing red paint on public art around NYC, leaving anonymous manifestos as their only clue.

At a gallery opening for former street artist turned corporate machine Shepard Fairey, members of the group appeared distributing 16-page tabloids, and one of them was arrested and accused of lighting a stink bomb at a Fairey show in Dumbo . . . (article in NY Times).

Knock on Wood

A History of Sex (Auto-Erotic), 1996.

Andreas Serrano is, of course, most famous for his artwork Piss Christ. It may be important to view all of the works in this series to put this in a larger context.

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/FEATURES/ho/ho3-11-97.asp

Maggots & Pet Dander Art

(click on image to go to article)





and modified vermin skeleton art here

DIY: "The Venice Biennale of alt-design"

NY Times, 6/23/07, on the Renegade Craft Fair:

"Birds have got to go. Forest animals have had their day.”

So while the sparrow and the owl — last year’s favored animal and the symbol of the fair — are out, the octopus, a burgeoning contender for creature of the moment, has been joined by other sea dwellers, like the squid . . . (link to article).

Paris Hilton Autopsy Art

click photo to go to article

Simon Schama's Power of Art

BBC documentary 8-part series on PBS, starts tonight, reviewed here.

Blog Posting Template upgrade: Expandable Posts

The Create window for this blogger has been updated to allow for expandable posts. This refers to posts where the first part appears on the main page followed by a "Read More" link to the rest of the entry. Here's how to use it:

In the Create posting window, you enter the summary (initial portion of the content) where it prompts you "Type your summary here." Remember to delete the actual text "Type your summary here" so it doesn't appear in your posting.

The "jump" will appear where you see the html text about 'fullpost'.

Enter the remainder after that, where it prompts "Type rest of the post here" and delete that prompt text as well.

If you don't want a jump in your post, just delete all the prompts and html that initially appear in the Create window.

Virtual Reading Group: Quality in Art

As a means of opening up the discourse and sharing the dialogue, I thought I'd post the next set of readings that our artist reading group is examining.

Artist Reading Group
Reading #3

How do You spell Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y?

The following readings were selected to help us consider what quality means in the making of art. This means engaging with the idea of the aesthetic, which seems to be inextricably linked to values, which brings us back to the importance of knowing our individual selves as artists.

The pieces about socially engaged art by Kester and Bishop give contrasting views of how quality or value is assessed in one area of art, which differ in how they choose to relate to historical notions of value and meaning in art.

The idea behind all of these selections is to get us to examine and question not only our own values as artists, but to become conscious of our creative intentions on a deeper level.

So a suggested outcome of these readings is not only consideration of the above, but to arrive at the next reading group meeting prepared to talk about how each of us defines success as an artist, not in generic, generalized terms, but in the most honest and individually specific terms we can muster, for our own selves in our practices. The underlying purpose is to help sharpen and focus direction in our creative processes.

Reading Selections:

Tom Robbins, “What Is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?” from Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins, Bantam 2005.

Brenson, Michael. From Acts of Engagement: writings on art, criticism, and institutions, 1993-2002. 2004, Rowman & Littlefield.
Chapter 2: Experience, Complicity, and Quality
Chapter 5: Art Criticism and the Aesthetic Response

Kester, Grant. From Conversation Pieces: Community & Communication in Modern Art, 2004, UC Press.
Excerpt from Chapter One: The Eyes of the Vulgar

Roche, Jennifer. “Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop” from http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php

What happens to us when art connects to the unconscious

The second part of that two-part series by Steve Winn in SF Chronicle.

NY Times article The Alchemist’s Moment: The Reclusive Mr. Polke

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/arts/design/27voge.html

From Laughter and Tears -- a Cleansing of the Heart (Osho)

Osho,
What do you say about modern art?


I don't know much about modern art, and I don't want to know much about it either. It is not much of an art. In the past art had a totally different quality: it was beautiful. Modern art is ugly. It is very rare to find something beautiful in modern art, and I can see the reason. The modern mind is boiling with repressed sexuality, anger, hatred, violence. Centuries of repressions have become accumulated; it has come to a crescendo and it is erupting. The volcano is erupting!

Modern art is more like a catharsis, more like vomiting. It is not art. One just wants to get rid of all kinds of poisons that have become accumulated. The same is true about all dimensions of art; music, poetry, painting, sculpture -- they all have become ugly.

Modern man is suffering, is in immense misery and hell and that shows in modern art. Modern art is a reflection. Art is always a reflection, it is a mirror, because the artist is the most sensitive person in the society, hence he is first to become aware of what is happening; others take a longer time to become aware.

The poet is the most prophetic because he becomes aware of things which are going to happen, he becomes aware a little ahead of time, hence he is never understood.

Modern art is psychotic -- it reflects humanity. It shows that something has gone wrong, very wrong: man is falling apart. And modern art is representative art. In a way it is very realistic; it is not creating a dream world, a fantasy. But it has lost the artistic touch.

Amrita, just as modern man needs a new birth, modern art also needs a new birth. But that is a secondary phenomenon. Unless a new man arrives on the earth a new art cannot arrive, a new poetry cannot be born.

Painting a Picture of the Creative Mind

The first in a 2-part series on art and creativity, in the SF Chronicle.

"That's one way of getting at the fascinating paradox of any artistic endeavor. Only by mastering certain rigorous skills and navigating a highly conscious sequence of decisions can an artist hope to unlock the deep chambers of human experience that make the end results matter. It's in this delicate negotiation of craft and inspiration, conscious choices and the summons of the unconscious, that art finds its form and communicative power."

-- Tuesday: What happens to us when art connects to the unconscious.

Nature Cuter than Sanrio?

At our painting class's final crit yesterday, instructor Glen mentioned these deep sea critters from a Science story in this week's NY Times.

Info Binge: Participation

So many books, so little time: some of what I'm reading and excited about, artwise.

Participation / Claire Bishop (2006) Just picked up at library today, looks like best reader I've seen so far on art that engages the viewer as producer.

The following are also on the same or related subject:

What we want is free : generosity and exchange in recent art / edited by Ted Purves (2005)

Conversation pieces : community and communication in modern art / Grant H. Kester (2004)

New practices, new pedagogies : a reader / [edited by] Malcolm Miles (2005)

They all seem to reference this one:

Relational Aesthetics / Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) which I haven't been able to find yet, but is excerpted in Bishop's Participation above.

Eventually I want to check this one out:

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, & Art / Lewis Hyde (1998)

Art, Culture, Environment: Jason Taylor's Underwater Sculpture Gallery

"The aim of the Sculpture Park is to create a unique space which highlights environmental processes and celebrates local culture. By creating an artificial reef of sculptures which depict Grenadian peoples and their history, the project fulfils its dual purpose of protecting the marine environment and illustrating the richness of Grenada"

You can learn more about the project here.

Active Engagement of Audience

Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal has locked himself into a studio with live webcams for the month of May.

The public can watch him 24/7 over a live webcam; and if they choose, visitors to his website can shoot him with a remote controlled paintball gun. Log on, shoot at an Iraqi. Bilal’s installation – titled Domestic Tension - disturbingly raises awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis.

Bilal has become known for provocative interactive video installations. He is interested in transforming the normally passive experience of viewing art into an active participation. His goal is to engage people who may not be willing to engage in political dialogue through conventional means.

More info here.

"I wish that people liked me."

"People have a hard time swalling a person like me. I evoke, I irritate in general. I wish that people liked me. I'm just not willing to become anything different to get that [approval]."

Vincent Gallo, "Renaissance Man" interview in SF Bay Guardian, May 2-8, 2007, p, 27.

Celebrity Tabloid - Art about Obsession with Celebs

http://galleryoftheabsurd.typepad.com/14/tom_cruise/index.html



Interesting site. Work by a very observant artist. Celebrity news are already making fun and showing a different side to celebs. Very creative and witty in pointing out characteristics. Also conscious of art history when painting celebs as other artists would have painted them.

ARTIST WALK to overcome fear of judgement and rejection

Did the title peak your interest? Isn't fear of judgement and rejection a big issue for artists and most humans in general? Shouldn't we do something to dissolve that?
A friend of mine just told me she only copies art and does very safe artwork because she thinks the stuff in her head is just too weird and she feels that showing what's in her mind is like walking naked on Times Square.
That made me think what if we called for an ARTIST WALK against fear of judgement and rejection. What if 100's of artists agreed to walk naked on Times Square. We just discussed public art and if it should be self explanatory. Most people can relate to that fear of rejection and fear of doing something out of the ordinary and acceptable. It would also be a protest against the business of museums and galleries who expect artists to be a certain way and do certain art. We need to break out of that people pleasing mode.
Even if we got arrested, we would have some impact and get publicity. What do you think shapeshifter? Is this too naive and crazy?

Cherry Blossoms: Art, Empathy, Civilization

Here's yet another example of socially engaged art that, in contrast to the previous two examples which playfully challenge corporate hegemony, engenders empathy and a sense of tragedy with bravery to call attention to the killing that we as Americans are all complicit in. Click on images for story.

The Yes Men - artists or jack asses?

http://www.theyesmen.org/video/heritagetoast.mp4

http://www.dowethics.com/risk/video/acceptable_risk_launch.mov

http://www.theyesmen.org/politicsprime-small.mp4

their web site is

www.theyesmen.org

These guys impersonate World Trade Organization spokesmen and speak total non-sense at world conferneces and business meetings. They fake their way to those conferences, TV, publish phony press releases, come up with provocative campaigns.

watch the video. listen closely, lol!!

The corporate people are watching these what I consider art performances in their corporate environments and don't have a clue. These guys are some major tricksters. Art can be fun.

They pretend, have fun and come up with silly products but present them simulating typical business behavior and talk. They even create powerpoint presentations and animations to communicate their insane ideas. By assuming business manners they perfectly camouflage and this might show how the business world and politics might be like the Emperor's new clothes. Nobody has a clue or even cares, and everybody just follows the leaders. They managed to infiltrate into corporate environments through creativity and might make you question these environments and instuitutions that are part of our society and allow certain people to have certain identities and roles in society :)

Aren't we all just choosing and assuming a character and a stage to act it out? When we recognize that all titles, institutions, personas, jobs, roles in society we identify with are all just a construct that we might use to avoid looking at the unfiltered truth of who we really are.

Operation Best Buy

Found this on www.guerrilla-intervention.com. It's hilarious.

Improv Everywhere is a group of agents (pranksters) based in NYC who organize missions (happenings) in public space. Their intent is to bring excitement to otherwise unexciting locales and give strangers a story they can tell for the rest of their lives.

One of the group's latest missions took place in a Best Buy store and was carried out by more than 80 agents.

The group met at Best Buy, all wearing blue polo shirts almost identical to the store's uniform where after they entered the store and began circulating.

They did not claim to work at the store, however when a customer mistook them for an employee, they did their best to help out...

Extensive documentation is available here.

extreme boob art - japan

Just what is it about this that makes it art, and not just bigguns attached to a doll? (click on image to see more)

What separates it from the banality of porn? How does it operate on the level of aesthetic experience? Is there subtlety, multiplicity, simultaneity? Complexity in resistance? Potential for transformation? What role does cultural specificity or context play in the reading or experiencing of the work, and does it translate across borders?

Is it desirable, or even possible, to define "quality" in aesthetic experience?

Art Blogs

Covering the range of art blogs: ArtKrush

Also: an entry on How to get a gallery show, since after all, we have to get the work out there, noticed, and circulating, and this is but one way to do that . . .

Hack Work: Demands of the Market

The average work was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds to the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, p.88

Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
that most frightens us.
we ask ourselves, who am I
to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people
won't feel insecure around you.
We are meant to shine as children do.
We were born to make manifest
the glory of god within us.
It is not just in some of us: It's in everyone.
And, as we let our light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

lowbrow rising

Juxtapoz "art & culture magazine" is now the third largest selling art magazine, a marker of cultural currency for a movement that only appears to be growing.

Initially I dismissed it because I judged that approach to art to be lacking in what DJ Martinez refers to as simultaneity. In other words, it is characterized by skill, aesthetics, formal concerns, but where are the ideas, content, and politics?

Now, as it continues to exert ever greater influence on visual culture, it can no longer be ignored and I find myself fascinated by it, and needing to reexamine my own perceptions and values around art. Is the seemingly gratuitous obsession w/illustrational aesthetics and childish imagery, often put forth with nihilistic attitude, a more honest expression of our collective existence at this moment in time? Is the notion of an art of resistance that dares to challenge the audience a la Beuys or Martinez simply outre and out of touch, now seen as hopelessly naive?

what's your take on the visual culture represented by juxtapoz?

comic relief: (artist's) life is hell

(click on image to enlarge)

Worship False Idols or Make Great Art: How Do You Define Success?

What advice would you give to the current generation of aspiring artists?

My only advice is to spend less time on thinking about success and put all the energy in making art itself. Otherwise your relationship to your art changes. It becomes less genuine and honest. Art should not be born from pressure of becoming successful but something deeper. This is always a danger and the cause for mediocrity in art. If a great idea or art is born, everyone will come to it sooner or later. This is a fact.

--Shirin Neshat, interviewed in Linda Weintraub's In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art, 2004, pp. 214-221.

Did you sell anything at that show?

No. My shows have never been about selling art. My interest and concern is in the creation of meaning. I am not really concerned with the free market or the fashion of the day. One of the questions is: is it possible to create work that is effective, complex, and deeply visual and to remain in a mode of experimentation using simultaneity, multiplicity, proximity, and agency as active ingredients to produce art?

--Daniel Joseph Martinez, Ibid. pp. 374-383.

I've always felt that the most important thing for an artist to do is to find some way to make a living that has nothing to do with their work, and to be happy with that, and to keep the financial burden off of their artwork . . .

So you don't think that that is a distraction from your artwork?

Well, it might be a distraction, but it's completely unrealistic for anyone to graduate from art school and think that they're going to make a living off their work [laughs]. That's a fantasy a lot of people have. But if somebody can be happy in their life and be making work, they have to understand that that's success . . . But the important thing is to keep it together for the long term and to believe that if you're able to do something interesting, people will eventually pay attention to it. That I firmly believe. But whether you're going to make money off it, or not, that is a different story. The art world is not a meritocracy. . .

Well, it seems like we're having a crisis of identity. Right now for us, it's money, you know? That's what has become the new code. But that's probably inherently unhealthy as well.

You put you're finger on it. Because if the measure of success is money, you have a built-in conflicted situation where people are going to be unhappy. I think it's important for people to understand that the way the art system is set up, you're always waiting to be validated from the outside. The biggest struggle in the arts is to realize that you have to validate yourself from the inside. You're going to be set up for disappointment and failure if you believe that the only way to be a success is to be validated from the outside, because you can't control that. There's no way to control the reaction you're going to get from the world.

--Tony Oursler, Ibid. pp. 304-313. (my bolds).

Reminder: It's all about the Ideas/Medium is just medium

You're known for highly stylized, aesthetically seductive films. With Dumbland, it seems you're exploring the other end of the visual spectrum. Is running the gamut from high to low part of your obligation as artist? Has it been cathartic for you?

No, it's not about that at all. It has to do with the ideas. When you get an idea, it tells you pretty much everything you need to know. There are 65mm ideas, and then there are crude Flash ideas, and then there are DVD ideas or painting ideas or furniture ideas. When I started getting ideas for one thing after another, they just happened to go with the drawing style you see in Dumbland. And as I'd do the drawings, more and more ideas would come to me.

--David Lynch, interviewed in Juxtapoz, March 2006 #62, p37.

Artists transform material, and that material can be almost anything, including ideas or social formations. This is what Beuys meant by “social sculpture.” For Beuys, art involved the transformation of matter into spirit.

--David Levi Strauss

Someone sent me this email. What do you think?

do NOT Accept This New Coin!
Do YOU?

U.S. Government to Release New Dollar Coins



You guessed it 'IN GOD WE TRUST' IS GONE!!!

Who originally put 'In God We Trust' onto our currency?
My bet it was one of the Presidents on these coins.
All our U.S. Government has done is Dishonor them, and disgust me!!!
If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!

DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE

Together we can force them out of circulation.
Please send this to all on your mail list !!!

Would it be art to boycott this?

Should an artist assume a Persona?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Vn6sE0kcPaI

Hi Everybody!

This is what I think this blog is about. We are artists who have been paying attention to what goes on in the art world, our culture and society. We are not happy about how things are and want to take action to shake things up, wake up other artists and people in general. Personally I believe being an artist comes with the responsibility to be a mind opener, enchanter, provocateur, someone who messes with conventional programming and actively or passively :) contributes to human evolution. This blog should be a place for people who are not afraid to take risks, who speak what is on their minds about art today and who are not afraid of being judged. Basically it should be an open portal for any expression we want to make in any form. It is also encouraged to critique and react to what people put out here. We have established this to have a vivid dialogue among artists who are well aware of our culture and of what the artworld wants to see and hear to be regarded as a "successful artist" but don't give a damn if it doesn't serve the evolution of art and our personal artistic development. This is not for the feable minded artist who only looks for approval and can't handle any intellectual punches. This doesn't mean that we should fight. It just means that we should be able to express our thoughts and emotions freely without fear of judgement. If you will be judged, you don't have to take it persobnally or it can be food for thought. We also don't have to agree on everything. I like to do a short visualisation before I enter this space visualizing that any and all blockages, fears and limitations are dissolved and my mind and feelings flow freely. I surround myself with love and connect with my heart chakra. Then I connnect my heart with my brain and my power center. I open myself to the universe and ask that my talents and inspiration may be used for the good of all. I am free of anger, doubt and fear, and smile. That doesn't mean I turn off my intellect. It just puts me in a better place for action and interaction.

Here is something about Joseph Beuys' work that I find inspiring. Multiples can be produced via media in larger and cheaper amounts than ever. I believe that has a huge impact on art and also a lot of potential.

-i

Joseph Beuys Multiples

The influential German artist Joseph Beuys regarded multiples as a crucial aspect of his activity that, because of their low cost and reproducibility, could communicate his ideas to great numbers of people. He made nearly 600 multiples from 1965 to 1985 in myriad forms: in addition to graphic works--woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and screenprints--there are found objects, photographs, records, audio cassettes, videotapes, films, books, leaflets, posters, postcards, printed matter, and works that inventively combine these media. The themes explored in the multiples echo and restate those addressed in every other realm of his activity, from politics, teaching, and environmental activism to sculpture, performance, and drawing, thus providing access to the full range of his ideas.

Joseph Beuys (1921 - 1986) is one of the most celebrated artists to have come of age in post-World War II Europe. His life was a gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) into which he poured all of his abundant energy, passion, and creative genius. His artistic activity--powerfully evocative sculptures, multiples, drawings, films, and performance events--is inseparable from his political activism, his teaching, and the charismatic persona he shaped for himself as shaman, prophet, and visionary. Beuys believed wholeheartedly in the power of art to effect social change. Today, his influence can be seen in the work of a generation of artists who absorbed his ideas about the unity of life, art, and the social organism.

startdrawing.org

asian drawing portal

14 seconds of commercial art

http://youtube.com/watch?v=sfW8X4o7T9I&mode=related&search=

Strategies of Resistance/Keeping It Real

Conversations between Daniel Joseph Martinez and David Levi Strauss on art after The End (of modernism, art, history, etc.) and teaching (and for us, studying and practicing!) in the present context:

After the end: strategies of resistance

Teaching after the end

They have a way of cutting through all the art world/market BS and getting down to what really matters in practicing art with consciousness and integrity.

This blog inspired by