Some Thoughts on Site Specific Work

This video from Artquest concerns the creation of site-specific public art commissions.

Artquest  is a great resource IF you read and listed and watch recognizing that what you hear is unique to the U.K. and may need to be reconsidered or adapted for application in a North American setting. The quality and depth of the topics covered is very satisfying to me. 

A Teacher's Pride

I wrote a play and for the past two years, it has been my obsession. Now it is over. It was produced to remarkable and entirely positive outcomes—some anticipated, many not—and one thing it did was allow me to include a scene to honour two of my teachers from grade five (which was centuries ago). Those two teachers gave a sad little boy reasons to live.

I contacted them to ask if I could use their real names in the script and they were okay with that. A year and a half later, I contacted them again to see if they wanted to be my guest on opening night and then accepted (and brought their children). On opening night, I was very conscious and proud during that scene knowing that they would realize what a wonderful and positive influence they were on my life and that here I was, at age 65, still raving about them. I was particularly happy that their children would see how loved their parents were by a past student.

When I got home, I got this email...

Hi Chris!   

I just wanted to touch base with you -- and give a quick update on one of your Emily Carr "The Business of Art Practice" class students.   

At the end of the class you'd asked us to map out our goals for the short term/long term future, and in my presentation, my goal was to get myself to a point where at the end of 2012 I could go part time at my regular day job, and then by the end of this year be in a position to quit and be fully self-employed.   

Well... The timeline kind of jumped a year. I put the wheels in motion, put the word out to the Universe, and then everything started falling into place. Someone I  had done a book cover design for started a boutique publishing company and asked me on board as their art director. Then a couple author friends asked me to design their book cover with another publisher. That publisher loved what I did and asked if I'd like to do more for them. Next thing I knew, I was so busy I was basically working two full time jobs and having very little time to write my own books. So at the end of 2012 I asked my boss if I could go part time, which she was happy to accomodate. But due to hiring freezes and such, they had to make me an outside contractor. It wasn't until I walked out of the office that last day that I realized I'd basically just quit my job and was now, a year earlier than planned, fully self-employed. :-)  So, I wanted to thank you so much for your class, and thank you for the foundation that helped me make this work. I hope more of your students make their way to successful creative careers too!   

All the best,  Wyanne (fall 2011 class)

Brilliant Resource: Robert Genn

In case you did not already know about Mr. Genn's website, The Painter's Keys, it is an amazing resource—especially for painters. His Ten Commandments of Art Pricing display his abundant confidence, wisdom and sense of humour:

• Thou shalt start out cheap.Thou shalt publish thy prices.
• Thou shalt raise thy prices regularly and a little.
• Thou shalt not lower thy prices.
• Thou shalt not have one price for Sam and another for Joe.
• Thou shalt not price by talent or time taken, but by size.
• Thou shalt not easily discount thy prices.
• Thou shalt lay control on thy agents and dealers.
• Thou shalt deal with those who will honour thee.
• Thou shalt end up expensive.

Appropriation versus Copyright Infringement

This is a simple but helpful talk about "appropriation" versus "copyright infringement." Although it is done by the excellent British resource, Art Quest, Canadian law is essentially based on English common law. If you go to see it on YouTube you will see many other videos on the same topic listed to the right as this video plays.

Don't try This

Denver police have busted organizers of a marijuana club operating out of an art gallery. The organizers offered free pot in exchange for donations to the gallery.

CBS4 Investigator Rick Sallinger first reported on the deal when he went undercover to the gallery two months ago.

Last November voters approved Amendment 64, legalizing recreational pot. But there’s still no system for buying and selling it, so places like the 530 gallery have come up with their own unique ways.

Link

Human Values Affect Market Value

Last month, an article by Jen Graves in Seattle’s weekly paper The Stranger exposed the artist Charles Krafft as a white nationalist and Holocaust denier, and former admirers of his work are now stripping it from their walls. Krafft, who is sixty-five, has been a respected figure in the Seattle art world for decades; his work has been shown in galleries around the world and featured in Harper’s, Artforum, and The New Yorker. Since the nineties, he has been known for combining decorative ceramics with loaded political imagery—delftware plates and other objects commemorating Nazi atrocities, porcelain AK-47s and hand grenades, perfume bottles with swastika stoppers, and a teapot and other pieces in the shape of Hitler’s head. In the past, many art collectors and curators had interpreted this work as a critique of bigoted and totalitarian ideologies. Now, the revelations about Krafft’s repugnant personal opinions have cast his work in a new light, and brought up knotty questions about how an artist’s intent should influence our evaluation of his work. We have precedents for heinous personal beliefs coinciding with creative brilliance (Ezra Pound, Richard Wagner), and bigotry embodied in works of great formal achievement (“The Birth of a Nation,” “Triumph of the Will”), but this is an unusual case of an artist’s ideological extremism so suddenly exposed, and so plainly relevant to his art.

In recent articles discussing Krafft’s Holocaust denial, one of the main ideas gaining traction is that he has been duping the art world by passing off as ironic Nazi imagery that was, in reality, intended as homage or propaganda. Graves, who is the Stranger’s art critic and, in 2009, featured Krafft’s ceramic AK-47 on a list of the best works of art ever made in Seattle, raised the possibility that Krafft had been “using the guise of art and irony to smuggle far-right symbols into museums, galleries, collectors’ homes, and upscale decor shops,” and wrote that, according to old friends of Krafft, he has “laughed in private at the liberal-leaning art establishment he’s fooled with his art.” An article on the blog The Weeklings, re-published at Salon under the headline “We Let Charles Krafft Fool Us,” asked, “If Charles Krafft…is capable of fooling thousands into thinking him a forward-thinking genius, who else are we currently paying, or worshiping, to fill us with surreptitious hatred?”

Read the whole article at the New Yorker.

The Museum Is Watching You

Tracking visitors helps Matt Sikora make the museum more engaging.

Matt Sikora doesn't look at the Rembrandts and Rodins at the Detroit Institute of Arts. His eyes are trained on the people looking at them.

Mr. Sikora watches where visitors stop, whether they talk or read, how much time they spend. He records his observations in a handheld computer, often viewing his subjects through the display cases or tiptoeing behind them to stay out of their line of sight. "Teenage daughter was with, but did not interact, sat on bench, then left," read his notes of one visit.

Mr. Sikora is the Detroit Institute of Arts's director of evaluation. He and five other observers are studying how visitors use the exhibits so the museum can tell if its information is accessible and which galleries are popular.

Read the whole article here in the Wall Street Journal.