#only for people to mostly like artwork from bigger more established artists

[hypocrisyofandrewdobson]

Dobson's Patreon: An Addendum to His Monument of Sins

(The following is a submission from @soyouareandrewdobson, meant to be an addendum to the multi-post submission @ripsinfest made a while back. Ironically, this one also had issues when being submitted, so I’ll be copypasting it here with all the images and links originally intended.)

In 2018, user @ripsinfest wrote a multipart series of posts for THOAD, recounting Dobson’s attempt to establish a patreon in 2015 and how it resulted in failure on a massive scale, to the point that his patreon is arguably “a monument to all his sins”.

Personally I think the post series is extremely well researched, rather “neutral” in terms of tone (letting the posts provided as evidence speak more for themselves than the opinion of the writer) and gives a detailed but quick rundown on what went wrong. Primarily that Dobson overestimated his own “value” as an artist and did NOT attempt to give his few supporters what they wanted through his artwork posted around the time.

I do however want to use the opportunity to also point out at certain obvious things that in my opinion (and likely the opinions of others) added to the failure of the patreon account, that were not accounted for in detail and are primarily related to how the internet perceives popularity and Dobson’s inability to understand, how to “sell” and make himself look good to the public.

To begin with, let’s just point out a certain truth about making money via Patreon: To do so, depends a lot on your popularity as a content creator online. That is simply because the more popular you are, the bigger your fanbase is and as such the more likely a certain percentage of people may be willing to donate money to you and your work in hopes they get something out of it, even if it is just the altruistic feeling of having helped someone they “like”. It doesn’t take a genius to see, how e.g. internet reviewers such as Linkara or moviebob (around 2800 and 4400$ earnings via patreon each month respectively) can make quite some money, while other, more obscure content creator or artists barely make money to go by, earning essentially pocket money at best.

In addition, popularity is fleeting. A few years ago e.g. internet personality Noah Antweiler aka The SpoonyOne managed to earn 5000$ a month via patreon, just shortly after establishing his account. But his lack of content over the years AND his toxic behavior online resulted in a decline of popularity and with it people jumping off his Patreon. As such, Antweiler only earns nowadays around 290$ a month via Patreon and most of that money is likely form people who have forgotten they donate to him in the first place anyway.

And Noah is not the only one who over the course of the last couple of years lost earnings. Brianna Wu makes barely more than he does, despite having once been the “darling” of the internet when the Gamergate controversy was at its peak. Many Bronies who once made more than 2k via video reviews on a show about little horses at the peak of its popularity (2013-15) earn less than 300-800 on average nowadays because interest on the show as well as people talking about it has declined.

Heck, in preparation of writing this piece I found out, that one of the highest grossing patreons nowadays is “The last podcast on the left”, a podcast that earns more than 67k a month by making recordings on obscure and macabre subjects on a regular basis.

So there you have it folks: As the interests of the internet users change, so does the popularity of certain people online and -in case they have a patreon account or similar plattforms- their chances of making money via their content.

Which now brings us back to Dobson, who was not popular at all at that particular time and managed to become even less popular as the months and years passed by.

Sure, Dobson had his fans via deviantart, people knew who he was. But the later was more because of “infamy” than popularity and the number of fans he had accumulated online were representing people interested in him at least since 2005 and did not quite represent his actual present day numbers of supporters at the time.

And mind you, the number of supporters was less than 100k, most of them likely underaged deviantart users. And if my research indicates something, then that most content creators with a halfway decent patreon earning need at least 100k+ followers in total. Because of those fans, only around 1-3% will on average then spend money on you, if you actually create content they enjoy and on a regular basis.

Which brings up the next major problem: Dobson did not create content people enjoyed and that in more than one meaning of the word.

On one hand, as pointed out by ripsinfest, he barely released any content at all over 2015 after a few initial months, despite the fact that he was obviously active online a lot, as shown by his presence on twitter. On the other hand, the few things he did create were not the stuff people wanted.

As an example: If you go to a restaurant and pay for a pizza, you expect the cook to give you a pizza. If however for some reason he just gives you a soda, you get ripped off and never come back. In Dobson’s case, the thing people wanted was not pizza but comic pages. But what he delivered was mostly bland fanart, such as of Disney and Marvel characters crossing over or KorraSami. Sure, a few strips of “So…you are a cartoonist” were still released at the time, but not really many.

To give an overview: Taking the release dates on Dobson’s official SYAC site into account, he released around 16 strips of it between March and August of 2015, the last two being “No Leia” being titled “Zip line”

Afterwards, the next official strip released was “Anything at all” in October of 2016.

Now to be fair, there was at least one more strip at the time Dobson released via patreon, that is also save to see on kiwifarms and other plattforms, which has not been uploaded to his official SYAC page. Likely because he simply forgot about it.

But I think that in itself should tell you something about Dobson’s work ethics when it comes to his webcomics. He promoted his patreon in his own video as a way to ensure he can make comics in a timely fashion again for others to enjoy, but in an environment where certain artists are capable to create multiple strips per week at minimum, Dobson could overall not manage to produce more than 16 over a course of six months, which means an average production of 3 strips per month.

For comparison, Tatsuya Ishida of the infamous sinfest webcomic (a garbage fire of epic proportions from a TERF who I think should be put on a watch list) has produced on average 4 strips per week, including full page Sunday strips, for years and nowadays even releases stuff on a daily basis to pass the covid crisis. So a mad man who wants to see trnas people die, has better work ethics than Dobson.

In other words, people expected Dobson to actually get back into creating comics (with some even expecting a return of Alex ze Pirate), but he got in fact even lazier than before, releasing only SYAC strips and random fanart as a product. Which he then also tried to justify as his choice to make because a) he had mental health issues and b) no one can tell him what to do.

And sure, people do not need to tell you what to do. But when people pay/donate money to you expecting to get a certain product in return, they should get the product. Linkara e.g. by all means doesn’t NEED to review comics to have a fullfilling life, but he got famous for his reviews, people want to see his reviews and they pay him for those reviews. So obviously, he will continue those things.

Then there is also the fact that despite Dobson’s claims how he wants to create comics for everone to enjoy and that he aims to keep his artwork online for free so anyone can view it…(his exact words in his promotional video AND text on his patreon once upon a time)

…the reality was, that he wanted to use patreon as a paywall. Something I actually kinda pointed out at on my own account (shameless self promotion) once, but want now to elaborate a bit. Basically at the time Dobson opened up his patreon, he also was on the verge of leaving deviantart as a platform people could look at his work behind. Which he eventually did.

Meaning that the only major platforms for people to watch any “new” stuff by him were his patreon or art sites such as the SYAC homepage or andysartwork. Which granted, he did EVENTUALLY put his stuff on.

But unlike other content creators who would put “patreon exclusive” new content up on more public plattforms often within a few days, weeks or a month after making them “patreon only” at first, Dobson waited longer and did barely anything to promote his sites as places to look his stuff up for a public audience. In doing so creating a “bubble” for himself that hurt him more than it helped, as Dobson made himself essentially come off as a snob.

A snob who did not create content for everybody to enjoy, but ONLY for those willing to pay him at least one dollar per month. As evident e.g. by the fact that as time went by, certain content was never released outside of his patreon at all, such as a SYAC strip involving Dobbear screaming at the computer because he saw a piece of art that featured tumblr nose.

Lastly, there is the issue of his patreon perks and stretch goals.

See, his perks were essentially non existent. Aside of the beggars reward of “my eternal thank you if you donate 1 dollar”, two other perks that come to my mind were the following: If you donated up to 5$ at minimum, you got your name thrown into a lottery to potentially win buttons and postcards of his artwork. Unsold cheap merch from years prior he failed to sell at conventions basically. There was just a problem with that thing: That lottery thing, which he also was only going to initiate when he reached a stretch goal of 150 dollar a month? It was illegal!

Patreon itself has in their user agreement a rule that forbids people from offering perks that essentially boil down to “earning” something via gambling, which this lottery by Dobson was.

(THOAD chiming in here to add that, in addition to all this, he fully admitted he would be excluding Patrons that he “knew were clearly trolls” from the lottery. Which made the already illegal lottery also fixed, so...yeah.)

The next thing coming to mind was his “discount” on previous books of his he offered online, if you donated at least 10 bucks per month to him. Or to translate it: You would get a bare minimum discount at pdf files of books such as Alex ze Pirate and Formera (you know, the permanently cancelled Dobson comics) if you paid up 50-75% of their original price on Patreon already. And considering the quality of his early works, he should have given you at least a book per month for free if you dared to donate him that much.

As for the stretch goals… lets go through them, shall we:

100$: A wallpaper per month. Something he did provide with eventually, but barely. And after less than five of those he stopped to make them overall

150$: Monthly Gift basket Lottery, which as I stated, was illegal and almost got him into serious trouble with his account. Also not an initial stretch goal he made up but instead came up with a few months into his accounts existence. Finally it got temporarily replaced by Dobson playing with the idea to use 150$ per month to open up a server and art site where people could upload stuff for free similar to deviantart, but under his administration. Promising a “safe space” for other artists. Which considering Dobson’s ego and inability to accept criticism or delegate responsibilities would have likely ended like this:

175$: Establishing a Minecraft server for him and his fans to play on. Meaning Dobson would have just wasted time he could spend on creating comics to endulge in his Minecraft obsession.

200$: Writing a Skyrim children book. Aside of the legal nightmare that this could have been (I doubt Valve would have been happy of someone else profiting of their property) I have to ask, who was even interested in Skyrim by 2015 anymore? Sure, Skyrim was a popular game and it had its qualities, but it was also a trend that had passed by that time. So in other words, there was not a market to cater towards here.

300$: A strip per week guaranteed.

… are you fucking kidding me? 75$ per strip essentially? Something people expect you to produce anyway if you want to be considered a “prolific” creator worth supporting online? Imagine if certain internet reviewers would do that, telling you that if they do not earn at least a certain amount of money, they will not produce anything, period, or less than usual. And Dobson had already proven that he can release more than just one comic within a few days, if he is motivated by enough spite.

600$: Starting a podcast with his friends to talk about nerd culture. In my opinion could only work under the assumption that people even like the idea of listening to Dobson and his opinions. Which considering how very little people like talking to him sounds doubtful. Also, considering how Dobson tends to be late to the party when it comes to nerd culture, likely tending to be out of date faster than he could upload. Finally... what friends?

700$: Returning the love, as he says it, by donating some of the money patreon users gave him to other content creators. This in my opinion is the most self defeating cause possible. On one hand sure, being generous and all that. But essentially Dobson admits here he would blow the money people give him to support HIS art on others, essentially defeating the purpose of HIS own account. He also does not clarify how much of that money he would donate, meaning there was a high chance that he would spend less than 10% of it on other creators, only creating the illusion of support while putting the actual earnings/donations into his own pocket.

2000$: A massive jump ahead. 2000$ per month would result in him getting better equipment (as in a new computer e.g.) and as such “potentially” make more comics. Mind you, only potentially.

This goal in my opinion is also the most fucked up one. Primarily for the following reasons:

Lets say Dobson would have achieved the goal and actually earned over 2000$ per month for at least a year. His annual earning would have been 24k, minus whatever he had to pay as taxes and payment for using the patreon service. And what would he do with this money? Get himself a better computer and equipment by paying a minor fraction of it once. Then he could use that computer for years to come while still having over 10k in his account, plus his monthly earnings. And he may still just produce 3-4 comics a month of a series that has as much depth to it than Peppa Pig if not less.

Sure, many patreon users have 2k+ as a stretch goal on their accounts to signify that if they could make that much monthly, they could have the necessary financial security to focus their time primarily on their content instead of a regular job. And if the content they create is actually well made, many people would support that or be okay with it.

But 2000 dollars to buy ONE computer and not account for how this money will add up over time? And that in light of such profits people may actually expect you to create more than you barely do already? That is either a case of narcissism, plain stupidity because you can't look further than 5 feet or just shows how Dobson did not understand at all the tool he had at his disposal.

Bottom line: Dobson, like many times before, fucked it up. He overestimated the potential support and resulting profits he could make, he expected that his name alone would be enough to assure gainings instead of creating content to justify support and he was unwilling to really give his supporters anything worthwhile back.

And while I am sure that there were also many other factors guaranteeing his failure, those at least to me, were his "common" mistakes most other people familiar even with the basics of internet popularity would ahve avoided.

[geimei]

What supplies would someone need to open an okiya? Same question for Ochaya.

I’m pretty sure that @missmyloko has written about this before, but I can’t seem to find it right now, so I’ll try my best ^^’.

As for okiya, the first thing that comes to mind is a big collection of kimono and obi. It depends on how big the okiya is, but you’d need enough kimono and obi to outfit a few Maiko (maybe like three is the minimum, I’d say?) at the same time, both senior and Maiko, and some kimono and obi for dependent Geiko as well (again, I’d say at least two? But they probably wouldn’t be as important as Maiko-kimono in the beginning).

In kagai that give their Geiko more time to become independent, the okiya have bigger collections of Geiko-kimono, in kagai where that’s not the case, the collection is smaller.

Of course, the collection would start out smaller and get even bigger over time, and once in a while, okiya also discard of old, overused items and sell them, if their condition is still good enough (Umeno did that last year, for example).

A regular Geiko-kimono costs at least 10,000 USD, with fancier ones being up to 15,000 USD and formal ones costing around 20,000 USD, and a regular Maiko-kimono costs around 15,000 USD and their kuromontsuki can cost up to 25,000 USD, and that’s not even counting any obi, so you can imagine to how much money just the clothing would amount to. 

You’d also need hada - and nagajuban, eri, komon for the Maiko and houmongi and some tomesode for the Geiko for casual events, so the kimono-collection of an okiya can easily surpass 1 Million USD.

And then you’d also need hair ornaments and obidome! Regular daikin, maezashi and bira ougi wouldn’t be that expensive, but the tama, tachibana (only for junior Maiko) and hirauchi kanzashi (only for senior Maiko) and also the kushi very senior Maiko wear are already more expensive.

The kushi for Geiko are also quite expensive, and the bekko kogai they wear are made of real tortoiseshell and not only are these very expensive in the first place, since tortoiseshell-trade is heavily restricted nowadays, most of these pieces are antiques, quadrupling the prices. You’d also need toirtoishell-kanzashi for Maiko (kushi, hirauchi and chirikan) they wear them during their Misedashi and the first few days as Maiko and during very formal events like Shigyoshiki.

The obidome are the most expensive part of a Maiko’s outfit, and since they are worn almost every day, you need a good deal of them. They are made of precious stones and things like silver and platinum, so they can easily surpass the price of a kuromontsuki.

And then you’d of course need a building, you’d need the okiya itself. As far as I know, they don’t really build new ones anymore, so one would need to purchase a suitable building from the original owner, and this could, again, be over millions of dollars. Some of these buildings are smaller or bigger than others, so some okiya have enough space to house a lot of Maiko and Geiko at the same time (Komaya - 7 Maiko and 2 Geiko (I think?), Tama - 6 Maiko) and others only have adequate room for around 4 or 5 people, excluding the okaasan and the maids, who sometimes live on the premises.

Then, you’d also need furniture for the okiya, which needs to be of the finest quality, should guests be invited (which will be quite often). An okiya needs to be able to own expenive, high-quality furniture, both traditional and new, and art-works to not only show off their wealth, but also show that they are able to adequately support their Maiko and Geiko.

This is all excluding the running costs like utilities and food everyone has to pay for, and the lessons for Maiko and Geiko, the cleaning of the kimono, the maids and cooks etc. An okiya is incredibly expensive, 1 or 2 million seed capital won’t (even) cut it.

And you’d also need something that might be even more important than the money for both an okiya and an ochaya: You need conncetions. You could just go into any kagai and try and open an okiya or ochaya without any connections if you have enough money, but firstly, I highly doubt that you’d be very successful, and secondly, I doubt that they’d even let you (as in, purchase a building) in many districts.

You don’t necessarily need to be or have been a Geiko yourself to open an okiya or ochaya, but it does help, because it means that you already have many connections to the people working in the karyukai and the clients, have artistic experience and know what it’s like to be a Maiko/Geiko. However, you can also build relationships to the people in the karyukai in a different way (Katsufumi, okaasan of the newly-established Katsufumi Okiya of Kamishichiken, was a Geiko for only 2 years, but owned a bar and henshin studio for over a decade, Yuko, okaasan of the Umeno Okiya of Kamishichiken, was never a Maiko or Geiko, but grew up beside them and also has artistic experience).

And of course, as the okaasan of an okiya, you’d need girls and women wanting to be Maiko and Geiko to join you and as the okaasan of an ochaya, you’d need customers wanting to pay for your services and Geiko and Maiko wanting to work for/with you.

As for an ochaya, you of course wouldn’t need any kimono, obi or hair ornaments, you’d need the building and very nice furniture and artworks and also quite a lot of them, and everything would need to be absolutely spotless, so you’d also need to pay for maids and servers as well. Again, to open and run an ochaya, you’d need a lot of connections and people would need to like and respect you and think highly of you.

You’d need to be able to pay the restaurants preparing and delivering the food for you, you’d of course have to pay the Maiko and Geiko and you’d need to always be stacked up on expensive drinks, mostly alcoholic drinks like sake, wine, beer, shochu, whiskey etc., but also some non-alcoholic options, and depending on the guests, they might have to be personalized.

You’d need to buy less things to open an ochaya, but that doesn’t mean that the job of running an ochaya would be any less demanding than that of running an okiya. Not to mention that many okiya also have an adjoined ochaya, so they have to deal with a dual burden.

It feels like I’ve forgotten something, but that’s all that I can remember right now ^^’. If I’ve made any mistakes or you have something to add, please tell me so!

[withinthescripts]

Season 2, Cassette 8: Ohara Museum of Art (1980)

[tape recorder turns on]

Hello, I am curator Leah Akane, welcoming you to the Ohara Museum of Art, and our special exhibit of the work of the late Claudia Atieno. Toward the end of Atieno’s life, it was suggested by friends that she was walking toward more epic depictions. But as those works are unfinished, or perhaps not begun, we have but her more intimate concepts.

In this exhibit, we will see some of Atieno’s more political tributes to classic works, which were lost in the Great Reckoning. We also have the rarely displayed “Attentiveness”, which I feel has been an underrated part of Atieno’s catalogue.

Narrating your audio guide is journalist, artist, and dear friend of Atieno, Roimata Mangakāhia. We are (blessed) to have Mangakāhia’s knowledge not only of Atieno as an artist, but as a person. While not nearly as successful as her late friend, Mangakāhia has been an invaluable champion of Atieno’s work, perhaps as important to Atieno’s popularity as Atieno’s own talent.

We hope you find deeper understanding and appreciation for Atieno’s work, a life in art sadly cut short.

The exhibit begins in the main gallery. Artworks included in the audio guide are numbered. Enjoy your time at the Ohara Museum of Art.

[bell chimes]

One. “Stars”. Little remains of impressionist Vincent van Gogh’s work. There are a handful of photographs of “Starry Night”, and a portion of what remains in the paintings hangs in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Its new (Harmer Island) structure, a masterpiece of modern architecture.

Many works of the European masters were lost in the Great Reckoning. Many works by artists worldwide were lost, but at the center of Western art history were the impressionists. “Starry Night”, Manet’s “Olympia”, Cézanne’s “The Card Players”. These paintings are often recreated by artists in our new society. An exercise in cultural reclamation of course, an attempt to return to the knowledge and art and history that was lost after the war. But with “Stars”, Atieno took this replication trend in a new direction, a direction that rejected recreating what was lot. In fact, Atieno’s replicas were reappropriations of classic images. In her way, Atieno was rejecting a return to the past and embracing the society, albeit the society she wanted, not the society that was.

From the moment I first saw Claudia in 1970, she was obsessed with replications. In “Stars”, she takes the stylized swirls and moist, twinkling glimmer of twilight, and brings all of its vibrant motion to a halt. The irony of Atieno’s version of “Stars” is its complete lack of stars. The black sky looms above a charcoal city at night, mostly war-scarred and evacuated. Or worse, eradicated. The stars likely shine and soar behind the choking clouds, unaware and unobserved. What we see is merely a moon struggling to be seen in a humid black haze above the town.

Notice in the center of her painting the church spire, broken. The rising hills along the right, rocky and charred. The homes him and roofless. There are large spirals of smoke mirroring van Gogh’s inspired blue swirls, but in Atieno’s “Stars”, we see only variations of gray. The one contrast in her bleak landscape is the tall flames in the foreground on the left.

Did you ever go to church? What is a spire? Did God do this to us? If so, whose God?

Some critics refer to this as a fire representing the destruction of the Reckoning. But I believe that Atieno was attempting to evoke a bonfire, a possible celebration by the townspeople in the universe of her painting. A communal fire to burn old art, books, clothes and doctrines of the tribes which led the world to such destruction. The art of war, obviously, paintings and written accounts of war heroes, as we know now that war holds no place for heroes. All themes of national superiority were turned one by one to ash. Underneath the bleak sky, we have a fire of a new day, of a new people wishing to rid themselves of the package of their past, the treachery of nation states and family.

It’s a brilliant work and a perfect approach to artistic repurposing. It’s difficult to say when repurposing becomes just a copy or plagiarism, sometimes even the artist doesn’t know where to draw the line.

[bell chimes]

Two. “Attentiveness”.

Many critics claim Atieno’s “Attentiveness” is her most garish work, noting its bold, almost clumsy strokes and its unsubtle praise of her own fame and wealth. I don’t disagree with them, but I would hate to completely dismiss this work simply for its lack of tact and technique.

While Atieno never stated directly that it was a self portrait, it’s easy to place her as the woman central to this painting. Her narrow shoulders and short stature contrasted against the long, dark, braided hair.

The woman is exiting a luxury automobile, her head turned from the viewer, and a woman on the other side of the open car door, taking a camera from her bag.

Look at the photographer’s mouth agape, caught in a moment of surprise and awe at this chance encounter with a celebrity. Have you ever seen a celebrity? [chuckles] Were you this obvious about it? Are you impressed by luxury automobiles? Do you wear driving gloves?

While she often bemoaned the loss of her anonymity and by extension, a freedom of self, Atieno most certainly relished the attention her career provided her. She would shower, dress, put on makeup, take off makeup, undress, shower again and repeat the process for two hours before a gallery opening.

She always dressed fashionably, but at private parties or events, she carried herself casually and comfortably. She did not like photographs, only compliments. She grew bored with conversations that did not acknowledge her talents at least occasionally. I had many conversations with Claudia that acknowledged her talents, as I urged her to focus on larger projects, pieces that could continue to impact the art world, as she slipped further an further into lazy drawings of discarded papers and staplers and weak forgeries disguised as tributes. I told her about her incredible talents and she liked that part. I followed it up with a critique of her process, and that she liked less.

In “Attentiveness”, Atieno does not paint the face of the woman, only the face of the woman who sees her.

Look again into the photographer’s stunned face. Do you see awe, panic, adoration in a single oval (moor) into glistening eyes, and a hand frantically clutching a camera strap. Do you believe cartoons are art?

This painting is garish. It is clumsy. But it’s so revealing of Atieno herself. I do not feel we can devalue its worth simply because it does not seem to show any skill.

If Claudia were still alive and could hear what I am saying, she would never speak to me again. But she’s dead and cannot hear what I am saying and will still never speak to me again, so what are you going to do?

[bell chimes]

Three. “Sunglasses and Cigarettes”.

These are two men wearing sunglasses. They both hold cigarettes. Next to them is an unpleasant looking dog. The five-buttoned suit jackets these men are wearing are dissimilar to the conservative business fashion of council employees or the simple structure of police jackets.

These men look quite different from usual police, even undercover officers. Atieno has also spent quite a bit of time on their mouths and hands. Notice the texture of her lines in these areas of the picture. Much more detail on their tight countenances and the tense physical postures. Their hands are clenched, cigarettes poking out of stone fists. Their lips curled, not in anger but stern concentrations. And unlike agents from the Society Establishment, they do not attempt to hide their observations of Atieno and her private home.

Statespeople who appeared at Atieno’s home often tried to gather information, but in a sociable and subtle manner. These two men and their dog, a mixed breed similar looking to a Dobermann pinscher though, stand brazenly at the curb staring directly inside.

Given the rectangular framing around this sketch, I believe Atieno drew this from the front window of an apartment she lived in years before I met her. It suggests she did not go outside to greet or confront them. I believe she was perhaps frightened or at least dubious of these men and their dog.

Claudia socialized with many politicians of the new society, as well as other well known artists and business owners. She wanted to be as important as her art. But the edges of these circles (--) [0:12:19] roughly with insidious people, people who do not trust nor like those within.

These men and their unpleasant dog were from some place we should not want to know. [softly] Look at the way they stand and stare. Do you feel watched? What do you think they know about you?

Who do you think they report to? Do you believe in conspiracies? Claudia did.

I saw men like these once sitting at small tables on the footpath outside a small café in Cornwall. They watched me, smoking their cigarettes. I did not believe them to be anything other than well dressed men with a bad habit and an unpleasant dog. But Claudia was certain they were dangerous and covert operatives. I told Claudia if they were a threat we should lay low, have fewer parties and get togethers, but we did not. I don’t know how strongly Claudia believed in her own stories.

We had more parties with bigger, more important, more controversial people. Her then lover, Pavel Zubov, brought many friends who talked often of the new New Revolution. Nothing ever came of their bluster. But in an unstable new world, revolutions are not difficult. What happens after a revolution is another matter, of course.

[bell chimes] [tape recorder turns off] [ads] [tape recorder turns on] [bell chimes]

Four. “Lamp”. Oil on wood.

Of this particular era of Atieno’s life, during the height of her frame, this might be my favorite work, the type of work I encouraged in her. A piece which when she finished it, I applauded and opened a vintage Cabernet (--) [0:16:43] I’d been saving for such an occasion.

Most of her paintings from this time pander to a broader pseudo-intellectual audience, in search of strange moderately confrontational art, a story they can tell others, a debate they can have over art’s virtuosity and validity. They may say this is not art, but that argument is the art itself.

In “Lamp”, Claudia basically painted an inverted yellow V atop a brown circle on a flint background. It’s geometric to be sure, and part of a post-war revival of art deco, all of the evolutionary flourishes of art nouveau eradicated, however. Here we see only the effects of the lamp, an incandescent shine in the dark, but the actual architecture of the device is missing entirely.

I spent a full 20 minutes raving to Claudia about this work when she showed it to me in 1969. We had not known each other long, and our initial relationship was almost like a master and pupil. I could teach her nothing about the craft of visual arts. But we drank wine and talked late into the night. For all of her political and refined small talk at parties with celebrities and power brokers, I was – I flatter myself, one of the few people she could really talk to.

There was Pavel, but their relationship was purely one of mutual and tumultuous passion for each other’s bodies. Claudia’s and my relationship was one of passion for creation.

My praise of this painting, original in a way she had seemed incapable of, so bold but on the noise politically, went past her. I told her this, this is what she should be creating, not staplers or glorifications of celebrity, not copies of other works.

She put the painting away and later told me she’d destroyed it.

When the staff at the Ohara Museum told me they were showing this work, I flew to Japan just to see it again. I’m glad she did not destroy it.

[softly] Look at its architecture, its balance. How it’s teetering slightly. It’s not physically possible, this lamp, but every element is in harmony. Look at that shade of yellow closely. How can a human make that color? It almost makes me angry.

Which brush strokes in this painting do you resent? Are they the same strokes you admire?

I’d like to tell you that this is her finest work, but in the past few years, more tributes and derivatives of “Lamp” have multiplied throughout the modern society art movement. Her work seems to be a cheap replica of itself, rather than an original that inspired hundreds of copies. Perhaps this painting’s brilliance has been eclipsed by the works it instigated.

Or perhaps I’m the wrong person to be narrating your walk through this exhibit. There are several other paintings I could describe to you, but I think after just a few you’ve got the idea. These works are decades old, and you’ve seen countless tributes or copies of them. You don’t need me to tell you what a clear acrylic box full of acorns mean. It honestly doesn’t mean anything. Or rather it means Claudia Atieno recognized that quantity was greater than quality, that celebrity simply means that demand surpasses supply. If she could keep generating new work, she could keep putting on exhibits all over the world, filling the needs of art-hungry survivors of a terrible war and its apocalyptic aftermath.

[bell chimes]

Five. “Box of Acorns”. Acrylic box, acorns.

I already said you don’t need to hear about this work, but oh I don’t know. [sighs] Perhaps you need to hear about it.

There was an oak tree on the island of her home in Cornwall, and she collected the acorns, I watched her do it. She found this acrylic in a warehouse of post-war debris. I was with her that day and we marveled at the number of paintings and sculptures in that warehouse.

[crying] I really didn’t… [long silence, music]

[bell chimes] [silence]

[bell chimes]

I’ll stop beeping in your ears. No, I won’t.

[bell chimes]

Eleven. There’s not actually a painting 11, but I’ll just go on the idea you forgot to press stop or you’re curious to see how far I’ll take this.

[sadly] I will tell you though that investigators found parts of Atieno’s body two years ago. They weren’t certain they were hers at first. Pieces of bone and clothing washed up on a lonely beach on St Agnes island. Then this year they found teeth and most of a torso underneath several inches of mud along a rocky beach. The torso had pieces of clothing that matched the previous clothes. They knew from the torso that the body had fallen, been crushed by the hard slap of gravity.

And 8-year-old girl found the body. The girl’s attendant had to report the girl to retraining at the institute. A-a place dedicating to ensuring that society’s new precepts aren’t disrupted.

Not much is known about the institute, and what is rumored about them goes unproven but… there is reason to be suspicious. There is reason to be more than suspicious.

I’m positive that the scars of seeing human remains were less impactful than the scars of whatever… [sigh/weep] recalibrating they’re putting her through now. Or perhaps she didn’t know what she found, just a blue gray mound of – fetid biology, vaguely human-shaped, partially preserved in salt and mud.

Maybe the girl could make out the outline of a person in this rotten flesh lump? Somehow, that’s even more frightening. Something that looks human but is not. Is not anymore.

Crushed from a fall, they said. But it wasn’t the fall that killed her. [scoffs] She’d been falling for years. It was the rocks, or something that she hit, I shouldn’t just say “rocks” out loud.

I never forgave her for slighting her legacy in favor of fame, but maybe I’m the one who needed to be forgiven. For demanding too much of her, for resenting her. [sighs] For adoring her. For lots of things.

Teeth and a torso. [chuckles] Someone should paint that. Oh god, I’m sure you’re gonna want your money back from this audio tour. Tell the folks at the Ohara that the tape player seemed broken, or tell them that you didn’t end up enjoying it. don’t tell them what I said. Or do, I don’t care. I honestly don’t.

I loved Claudia! She was a gifted artist and giving friend. She had a period of work this museum seems to like, but which I find contemptible for its naked pandering.

Maybe I’m just sad. I can’t reconcile my feelings. [whispers] I can’t believe they found her body! [deep sigh]

I can’t believe I don’t get to tell anyone anymore that she’s still alive. I probably knew she wasn’t. but I could always tell myself she was.

Bone fragments on the beach, near a home for preteens. The first post-war generation to grow up without parents. The great experiment for a bright new world. [sighs] I don’t know.

[tape recorder turns off]

“Within the Wires” is written by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson and performed by Rima Te Wiata, with original music by Mary Epworth. Find more of Mary’s music at maryepworth.com.

The voice of Leah Akane was Julia Morisawa.

Don’t forget to check out the amazing “Within the Wires” T-shirts and Claudia Atieno art print at withinthewires.com.

OK. Our time is done, it’s you time now. Time to stop by the museum gift shop, grab yourself a souvenir book of paintings about [the sinus infection I have], pick up a poster featuring [me coughing] and buy a commemorative vase made out of [-].

[futurabase]

Blog 6: Watchmen

So HBO has spent the best part of 2019 looking for a show that can replace Game of Thrones as the big fantasy-action spectacle flagship for the brand and whilst they might not have struck gold a second time quite yet, what director Damon Lindelof has created could well be the best TV in 2019 has to offer. Let me explain. The original Watchmen graphic novel was created by writer Allan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons back in 1986 and basically serves as a huge middle finger to the mainstream comics establishment at the time. It received widespread praise not just for its political and social themes but also the nuanced complex characters created by Moore and the surreal, pseudo-dystopian setting loving rendered in Gibbons artwork. Despite the massive success of the book it was widely thought to be unadaptable, at least in movie format, although Zack Syder tried (and arguably failed) back in 2008. On the comics side of things there’s been prequels and crossovers but the idea of a straight sequel in any medium was considered sacrilegious to most hardcore devotees of the original work. 

Enter Lost creator Damon Lindelof with an ambitious idea for a modern-day-but-alternate-history setting sequel and not only continued and updated the original work’s political themes but also kept the general tone of pulpy weirdness and cosmic absurdity that made the original work so unique. For the most part at least that’s what Watchmen 2019 is, simultaneously being jam packed with little details and subtle callbacks to the original as if to sate the content hungry appetites of a thousand YouTube listacles but still by and large its own thing, with characters, themes and a setting entirely divorced for the originals cold-war era politics. The big hot button issue this time is race, with the core existential threat of Watchmen 2019 not coming from Russian bombs or Lovecraftian squid monsters blowing up NYC but rather from America's own sordid pasting coming up to bite it. The show is set almost exclusively in Tulsa, Oklahoma (with brief detours to Vietnam, the arctic circle and the moons of Jupiter of course) and centres around the legacy of the very real and very disturbing Tulsa massacre, in which a small army of white supremacist thugs descended on the mostly black town killing what some estimated was over 150 people and displacing countless more. 

The conflict in Tulsa in the world of Watchmen 2019 today is between the police, who all have to wear fluorescent yellow masks to protect their identity from bad guys (although some prefer more unique hero attire) and a Rorschach-masked right wing militia called the Seventh Kavalry, who want the more liberal america of the shows world to resemble something a little more like our own - oh and achieve world domination by giving a US senator the power of god, like I said, Watchmens’ weird. In the middle of this cop Angela Abar a.k.a. Sister Night, played masterfully by Regina King, has to tackle the mysterious death of her former police chief Judd, an equally mysterious wheelchair bound old man and the world richest woman, Lady Trieu (Hong Chau) building what is quite possibly a world-ending-doomsday machine next-door. The story twists and turns out from there and really has to be experienced first hand to be fully appreciated. Several key characters from the graphic novel make their return, Jeremy Irons is partially noteworthy as original Watchmen’s big bad Ozymandias with some bigger more game changing character reveals later on in the season.

Every actor in the show brings their A game which really helps to make this feel less like the traditional superhero fare and more like a serious TV drama, which in a lot of ways it is, although the wonderfully realised alternate history setting helps bring some of the more fantastical elements of the show into the spotlight. Watchmen 2019 is a different kind of comic book show, in world of CGI spectacle and never ending soap-opera style plot-lines, it stands proud as show with something real to say, one that challenges it’s audience with gleeful abbadon and, hopefully, one that will shape it’s medium for the better much like the original did.

[theplaguezine]

DARK TRANQUILLITY

Interview with Mikael Stanne by Daniel Hinds

(conducted August 1999)

Dark Tranquillity really established themselves as the forerunners of the melodic death metal movement in the 90s, with such albums as The Gallery and The Mind's I.  Their unique blend of fast, thrashy death metal and highly melodic riffing and leadwork helped make them a household name in the metal community relatively quickly.

With their latest album, Projector, the band has taken a turn to explore new vistas, utilizing clean vocals and a more organic sense of melody than before.  On the eve of the album's Stateside release, vocalist Mikael Stanne braved a hoarse voice and overseas connection to give me the low-down on one of Sweden's finest…

How would you say Projector differs from previous DT albums? I think it differs a lot.  We tried to experiment a lot more with this album, to kind of break free from what we'd done before.  Going in and writing for this album was really different for us because we wanted to keep all alternatives really open.  We got back from touring a lot for The Mind's I and we were like, 'Nope, we don't want to play this really fast stuff anymore.'  We wanted to do something else, like focus more on the emotional parts of the music than we have in the past - take it a bit further.  And the vocals had to change for the music, but I think that's the basic change - it's more open, more dynamic, more emotional.

Were you scared at all how people would react to the changes? Not really.  We thought about it, but we just said, 'This is exactly what we want to do,' so if people hate it, that's fine.  If people love it, that's fine, too, it doesn't really matter.  We just realized that we had to do this album, otherwise we couldn't go on playing.  We couldn't do another Mind's I or another Gallery or whatever.

Has the songwriting process itself changed any? Yeah, a bit.  We're started writing using portable studios and computers and stuff, so we can make a lot of the arrangements at home and then present it to the other guys.  Then we work on it from there and develop each idea.  It's an easier process, since we know each other so well.  Also, our drummer Anders contributed a lot to the music now.  It's much more open and we feel we can do just about anything.  It's really interesting and kind of a new start for us.

Are you looking forward to playing the new material live? Oh yeah!  This Friday is the first show, we're going to play a festival in Finland, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Why the title Projector? Well, it came from the time when I was writing the lyrics, about a year and a half ago.  I was having problems sleeping and just a lot of problems that I didn't really want to write about, but felt that I had to eventually.  I started digging up all this stuff that I didn't really want to talk about and once I got it all to the surface, I had to see all these things from a different perspective.  That's why you kind of put your distance to it.  The more I thought about it, the bigger it got and that's what the 'projector' is:  it kind of blows things out of proportion in order to make it more real and to see it with fresh eyes and from a new perspective.  That's what it meant to me, to put light on small things and make them huge, make them a monster.

Could you tell me about some of the specific lyrics on the album? They kind of deal with things that I hate, things about myself.  Mainly, weaknesses and errors and all the stuff that you do and you hate but you can't do anything about, you know?  I've come to realize that recently, that I do so many stupid things, I had to change my ways.  As a step towards being better, I write about it first and expose the problem.  A lot of it is about relationships between people, both my personal ones and other people.  Basically, what really annoys me about hanging around in the city with the people I socialize with.  The lyrics cover different aspects of this.

DT has always been blessed with cool artwork and I was curious how important the visual presentation of the band is to you. We've always been interested in the graphic side and artwork and everything.  Me and Niklas always kind of developed the concepts for T-shirts and the covers and everything, so it's always been a big part of it.  For me and Niklas, anyway.  We drew the first demo covers and EPs and stuff, so that's always been going on.  Now Niklas is self-employed and doing graphics.  He really wanted to do this whole concept for the album, with all the involved imagery.  He does all the T-shirts and homepage and everything, to create an overall feel for the music.

I understand you've done a video for one of the tracks on Projector. We just finished it the day before yesterday, actually.  It's for the song "ThereIn" and we did it with a couple of friends of ours.  We basically left ourselves in their hands and they did a video, which turned out pretty cool.  Not as good as we expected, but it's okay.  These kind of videos never get shown anyway, so there's no point in spending a lot of money on it.  It represents the song and represents us, so it does what a video should do, without being too much.

There is a major tour in the works for DT soon.  What details do you have so far? Right now we're just doing festivals, but on September 17th, I think we start and go for six or seven weeks with In Flames, Children of Bodom and Arch Enemy through Europe.  It's going to be our biggest tour yet.  That will be a lot of fun.

Sounds like a pretty killer line-up. Well, I think it is, it's a great package and we're all friends.  It's going to be crazy and hazardous to our health. (laughs)  Hopefully, we will do an American tour in November.  We've been talking about it a lot.  We were supposed to do it in August, but we didn't really feel right about that, so we'll do it in November, perhaps December.

Any new stops on this tour? Umm…yeah, Poland, I think that's the only one on this tour.  We also go to Japan in September, just for a couple of shows, and that's gonna be great.  We'll probably go to Mexico as well.  After that, we can retire. (laughs)

Do you get to see much of these countries you visit or is it mostly 'do the show and move on?' Pretty much just move on, yeah.  Sleep all day, eat, do soundcheck, do interviews, play, then leave. (laughs)  Sometimes we get a chance, though.  Sometimes we'll have a number of hours to just stroll around the city and that's great, but usually…  Like when we went to Rome, we were like, 'Oh, great!  We've gotta see this!'  We didn't see ANYTHING!  A big line of people, the inside of a bus, the inside of a club and that's it.  It can really suck sometimes, but it's great anyway.  The people are usually more interesting anyway.

Do you enjoy playing the big festivals? We actually haven't done many festivals, just a couple small ones.  When we were with Osmose, they weren't into doing festivals, as they thought of it as a waste of time more or less.  Century Media is really trying to get is on the festivals, though, so we're doing Wacken this year and Friday this really big one in Finland.  A couple others, I'm not really sure yet.

How did you get in touch with Century Media? We contacted the manager that we heard about and said, 'We want to have a record contract, can you help us out?'  So he sent out the record to several labels, and a lot of them were really interested and we started negotiating with like 6 or 7 labels.  Eventually it came down to Century Media because they were the most open-minded and agree to our terms more than the other labels.  We found out what a shitty, shitty industry that we're in.  All these labels wanted to change us, to have us re-record the album, and do all this and that and tell us what kind of image we have to have for the video, etc.  That's what we said in the beginning with Century Media:  you cannot control us in any way.  And they were like, 'Yep, totally cool, we agree to that.'

Did you have good luck with Osmose and Spinefarm? Yeah, all these labels have been great.  Spinefarm did a lot for us in the beginning.  They aren't really a record label, they're more a distributor in Finland.  That's their main thing and that's why they are kind of limited in their capabilities.  Osmose did fabulous work and we cannot thank them enough for bringing out our records, but we just felt it was time to move on and since the album is kind of different, we thought 'let's make a record label change.'  It felt like the best thing to do.  Of course, it's been great so far and hopefully it will just get better.

Are you at all surprised by the level of popularity that DT has achieved so far? Oh yeah!  We're just a couple of friends hanging out and playing, that's what we do.  Like in the beginning, when Skydancer came out, we didn't know what to expect, we just thought, 'This is not music that people get into nowadays, it's really a weird album.'  But people got into it and we were like, 'whoa! Cool!'  But it doesn't really affect us in that way.  At the end of the day, what matters is what we think about it and if we love it, that's okay.  If other people like, that's great.  But it's still really hard to think of it in that way and when people say that we were founders of this 'Gothenburg sound,' it's so hard to think of it that way.  We've just been playing forever.  It's nothing that we really think about, but of course it's very flattering that people buy the records and come to our shows.

DT has done a number of tribute albums and I was curious what your take on that whole market is and if there are any bands that you think deserve a tribute but haven't got one yet. It's a fun thing to do.  It's flattering that a label asks us to do one, that they want to hear our interpretation of another artist's music.  It's an opportunity for us to go into the studio and record some more, and that's always interesting.  It's a challenge to do covers, too.  I don't listen too much to the tribute albums, but if there's one of my favorite bands that have a tribute album, of course I'm going to buy it.  Sometimes they're good, sometimes they suck all the way through.  I listened to this Depeche Mode tribute album, it was pretty good.  Smashing Pumpkins were on it.

How did you first get interested in playing music? Like in '87, all of us in the band, we lived on the same street.  We hung out every day, just sat around listening to records.  We were nuts about music and calling up musicians and being really pathetic.  We were kind of bored, as well, just sitting around talking all day, so me and Nicky decided, 'Let's start playing and see if we can be as good as these guys that we listen to.'  So we started practicing and practicing and after about 5 months we decided we could play reasonably, and we asked our closest friends if they wanted to join a band.  They were like, 'yeah, why not?'  Nobody knew anything, so we just rehearsed and rehearsed, just to have something to do and our intention at the time was to do aggressive music that was also melodic.  That's more or less always been our goal, to mix the really extreme stuff like Kreator and Sodom and the mellow stuff like Helloween and Blind Guardian.

Okay, it's 1999 so here is the obligatory Y2K question.  How do you think things will turn out? Of course there is going to be some problems, that's inevitable, but I don't think it will be such a big thing as it is all hyped up to be.  I spoke yesterday about it with a friend of mine who works at Microsoft, and he said everyone is calling in, really worried, and all this paranoia.  But it really isn't that big of a problem.  It's going to be interesting to see like the suicide rate on New Year's Eve is going to be.  I think it will be weird and a lot of people will freak out, but I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show. (laughs)

www.darktranquillity.com

[adeolasthoughts]

Art and Medicine

An Essay on the links between art and medicine

Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.[1]The main feature is that it requires creativity and lateral thinking which provides people with different viewpoints and perspectives of particular situations and is very useful for effective problem solving. Medicine is the science or practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease.[2] Its regard as a science means that it is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world through observation and experiment.[3] At first glance, these two terms appear to be antonyms of one another. One which is expressive and the other which is regimented, however throughout this essay I explore how this is in fact not the case and how the study and practice of medicine relies on art.

An in-depth understanding of the human anatomy, is an area of knowledge required by all doctors. It enables them to link patient symptoms to possible diagnoses effectively. Anatomical drawings provide a visual representation of the aspects of the human body and help people understand it. Historically, medicine and art have been successfully intertwined, the development of medicine has also been dependent on art.  Medical illustration for instruction first appeared in Hellenic Alexandria during the early 3rd century B.C. covering anatomy, surgery, obstetrics and plants that had medical properties. [4] Initially, anatomy was linked closely with science, culture and art, many of the anatomic drawings were amalgamations of these themes with the aim of simultaneously educating and entertaining the viewers. Some of which depicted cadavers as very much alive, full of character and eccentricity or contrastingly, dead. An example of this is pictured below.

This drawing [5] shows the subject as a young man emerging from the bushes on a hill. This background helps to add a feeling of anticipation and a sense of an important revelation being expressed. This could also be used to express the fact that the knowledge of the intricate structures that make up the human body were only just being discovered at the time that this drawing was created. The artist depicts the male subject’s outer bodily features in a very realist style which enables the viewer to be able to relate to the subject and clearly identify it as a human being. It also influences the viewers’ perception of the organs being exposed in this piece.

On one hand the organs being shown seem real and believable as they are part of what seems to be a very real human being, expressing emotions not dissimilar to those that the viewer experiences on a daily basis. The way that the subject averts his eyes from the gaze of the viewer and uses his skin to cover his torso, expresses a sense of shyness and timidity that many people would have experienced as well as showing a sense of modesty.

On the other hand, the organs being shown seem unbelievable and magical. This is because the use of surrealism is a prominent component of this piece. One is not able to lift up their skin and reveal their organs as depicted here which makes the organs being revealed seem fake and unreal to some extent. Deeper analysis shows that the subject is positioning his hands as a magician does, adding an awe-inspiring, magical, implausible dimension to this drawing. Whatever the interpretation, this drawing links the educational and artistic properties of anatomy, seamlessly, leaving the viewer to make their own conclusions as to what is real and what is not.

Specific aspects of practicing medicine can be described as art. An example of this is surgery which is defined as ‘the treatment of injuries or disorders of the body by incision or manipulation, especially with instruments’. [6] During the process leading up to surgery, often many imaging techniques are used to provide the surgeon and their team with an understanding of the condition they are dealing with, the pathology and how to go about rectifying the situation. These images themselves can be seen as art, they are visual representations of the body that tell a story, some of which make use of the different densities of aspects of the human body to create a detailed picture. Together they can be seen as art as each imaging technique enables to see the body slightly differently, examples of this include ultrasounds, which only show soft tissue and MRI scans which show a cross-section of the body part being scanned. The invasive aspect of performing a surgery is also very artistic. A subtle example of this is that surgeons create incisions in the body enabling them to retract the skin, exposing organs of different shapes, sizes textures and densities. Upon revealing the aspect of the body concerned, the surgeon must inspect it and uses different tools to operate on the patient, cutting, stitching and removing parts of organs or blood vessels for example. The intricate workings of the body are being altered here improving bodily function in many people and leaving a lasting impression on the recipient. The need for a delicate hand, manual dexterity, a sense of purpose and an understanding of the medium that is the human body, is not dissimilar to an artist molding his structure or drawing his subject in a medium of paint or pencil. A more obvious example lies within the subspecialty of Plastic Surgery. This variation of surgery is most concerned with the outward appearance of different parts of the human body examples of such surgeries include rhinoplasties (nose jobs) and breast reconstructions from cancer. These require very intricate stitching to produce minimal scarring and the reshaping of parts of the body to look more aesthetically pleasing and more natural.

For surgeons, some of the most artistic procedures are found in microsurgical techniques where tissue is transferred from one part of the body to another based on establishing a new blood supply. This allows the surgeon to re-establish tissue in another location that can be rebuilt into something else. Here, the lines marking the division of medicine as art or science are increasingly blurred. Such procedures not only require extensive scientific understanding of anatomy and blood supply, but also are dependent on the surgeon being able to reshape one kind of bone into another. In the example of a tumour being removed from the mouth, a leg bone can be transplanted and carved into a mandible, for which an artistic perspective is paramount.

If doctors are criticized, it is often not for their lack of knowledge, but for a lack of insensitivity and for ignoring or being oblivious to the emotional distress affecting their patients. Mahajan (2006) warns doctors against allowing the science behind medicine to inhibit their humanity and sense of empathy. If medicine is viewed purely as a science, then the importance of successful patient-doctor communication and interaction is ignored. A knowledge of and ability to engage with fine art in particular, being able to deduce possible interpretations of artwork and be aware of the underlying emotional connotations being emphasised in the piece can help within the practice of medicine. This is because it makes a person more receptive to the people and emotions present around them, makes them more likely to notice intricate details regarding a person’s physical, mental and emotional state which can be crucial in correctly diagnosing a patient and providing the most suitable treatment overall for that patient. Also, the ability to analyse artwork can prove to be a great skill for doctors. This is because in the analysis of other subjects such as chemistry, the conclusions drawn are mostly based on fact that has been proven or a theory that is being developed, whereas art analysis draws on instinct, emotional response and the perception of a piece. Being able to look beyond the facts and particular list of symptoms to match a diagnosis with a patient can create a much needed patient-centered approach to medical dilemmas, focusing on the patient as a whole, seeing the bigger picture and then matching the patient with the diagnosis rather than the other way around. [7]

Though medicine relies on it, art can be its own form of psychotherapy involving the encouragement of free self-expression through painting, drawing, or modelling, used as a remedial or diagnostic activity.[8] The goal of this is to improve people’s mental health, specifically by reducing anxiety, helping to manage behaviour and addictions, allowing the client to explore their feelings and resolve emotional turmoil. Art therapists use their understanding of visual art in conjunction with counseling theories and techniques. It is widely practiced in hospitals, psychiatric and rehabilitation facilities, schools and other clinical and community settings and it is a prime example of how art can not only link with medicine but enhance it. [9]

TO

Sources 1. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=art+define 2. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+medicine 3. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=science+define 4. History, Present and Future of Medical Art http://www.vesaliusfabrica.com/en/related-reading/karger-gazette/medical-art-through-history.html 5. National Library of Medicine Tabulae Anatomicae: Venice, 1627. 6. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+surgery 7. Lisa Sanders: Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis (2009) 8. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+art+therapy 9. http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/berlet.htm

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

The 100 Greatest American Music Venues | Consequence of Sound

Feature artwork by Cap Blackard

Where did you attend your first concert? Mine was at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. It was Counting Crows touring their second album, and for every detail that can be recalled of the actual performance is a bit of memory on how the space felt. The Wiltern was seated back then, and from the ornate chandelier to the first glimpse at a merch stand, the lasting impression was of how big everything felt, how a venue was a place you could get lost in, where the rules of reality didn’t necessarily apply.

Of course, part of that feeling is just youth, but the great venues do have a transportive quality. Details of the box office or the bathrooms or the bar all hold their own weight, building significance both in spite of and because of the experiences held in the rooms. And some of these rooms are better than others. Sure, the most unexceptional concert venues might be near and dear to our hearts because of the shows we saw there or the people we met, but the really great venues go beyond that. There is history between their walls, features that are unlike any other concert space, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound that allow for artists to realize their vision of live presentation.

We took all of this into account when selecting the best 100 venues in the US. Both major and smaller markets are represented, while the sizes range from arenas to bars. There are venues whose history extends back 100 years, and there are others built in this century. But they all hold a certain common ground. A big one is the booking, with most still lining their schedule with the best talent. A few that don’t make their money on national touring acts are known for booking top-tier local acts. All of these venues, though, are known for quality shows regardless of who is actually up on stage.

We’ve already asked our readers to weigh in on their favorite American concert venues. And a number of artists have made their own selection. Now, it’s our turn.

–Philip Cosores Deputy Editor

Established: 2003 What You’ll See: Ian MacKaye, My Brightest Diamond, Cloud Nothings

Despite being sandwiched between two major cities, Connecticut is pretty barren when it comes to culture. Drive out to what feels like the middle of nowhere in Hamden, though, and you’ll find one of the state’s hidden gems: The Space. The all-ages venue sits in a huge, desolate parking lot, but once you step inside, it comes to life. Lights string the ceiling like silly string, a snack bar sits at the side with baked goods, and a flooded thrift store and arcade room hide upstairs.

It’s all types of cool without trying to win cool points, allowing The Space to boast the feel of a DIY Brooklyn space without all the pretension. Thanks to its tiny 150-person capacity and Connecticut’s limited venue options, concertgoers get an intimate show from bands that play far larger venues elsewhere on their tour. Then you step back outside and remember you’re in the middle of nowhere — which, ultimately, makes the venue feel all the more like an Alice in Wonderland trip.

–Nina Corcoran

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Established: 1930 What You’ll See: Animal Collective, Leon Bridges, Tyler, the Creator

Added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 2003, Cain’s Ballroom has a long history of serving various purposes, not hitting its stride as a contemporary music venue until relatively recently. It was initially constructed in 1924 as a garage for Tulsa co-founder W. Tate Brady’s vehicles. Six years later (or five years after Brady’s suicide by gunshot), Madison W. “Daddy” Cain converted the place into a dance establishment, giving it the name Cain’s Dance Academy.

From then on, it’s grown more and more synonymous with musical happenings in Tulsa, playing host to the Texas Playboys’ radio broadcast on KVVO and, after being sold to Larry Schaeffer in the 1970s, even the Sex Pistols in 1978. These days, a wide array of artists swing through for shows at 423 N. Main St. in Tulsa, including a considerable variety of hip-hop acts — A$AP Ferg, Tory Lanez, and Bones Thugs-n-Harmony are all scheduled for upcoming shows.

–Michael Madden

98. The Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace

Las Vegas, Nevada

Established: 2003 What You’ll See: Celine Dion, Rod Stewart, Reba McEntire, Elton John

Yes, the Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace looks like pure Vegas kitsch, a concert venue built to resemble the Colosseum of Rome. And yes, the residency program (inaugurated by Celine Dion) sometimes feels like an elephant graveyard for past-their-prime musical acts. But dig deeper, and this venue inspired by an ancient wonder soon reveals itself to be a modern marvel. The stage includes 10 motorized lifts as well as North America’s largest LED screen, which stands 40 feet tall and projects elaborate, seemingly three-dimensional backgrounds.

Despite a capacity of 4,100, no seat is more than 120 feet from the proscenium. That intimacy, combined with astounding acoustics and a stage spanning 22,400 square feet, means that everyone has a front-row seat for the always dazzling spectacles. All of these perks, combined with an extended stay in an exciting city, make these residencies very attractive to aging performers. If Rod Stewart or Reba McEntire aren’t your speed, that’s fine, but you’ll be glad it exists in 2031 when Jay Z starts his residency.

–Wren Graves

Established: 2012 What You’ll See: Burgerama, Beach Goth, Morrissey, Fetty Wap, Jenny Lewis

Using the shell of the Galaxy Concert Theatre, which hosted B-level gets like Sugar Ray and Medeski Martin and Wood for its run from 1994-2008, The Observatory emerged from a massive restoration that turned a 550-cap concert theatre into a two-room concert juggernaut. The main stage hosts acts ranging from hip-hop elite to Orange County legends in a 1,000-person space, while its smaller 350-cap Constellation Room is the only place in the OC to catch an act like Mitski or Into It. Over It.

One of the best aspects of the venue is how well it’s booked, landing better rap acts than any venue in neighboring Los Angeles, while often featuring bands offering warm-up shows before their much bigger LA or festival stops. It’s even become the sight of an occasional festival, with Burgerama and Beach Goth both utilizing the dual indoor stages and the outside parking lot.

–Philip Cosores

Established: 2002 What You’ll See: Synths, sun tans, and a sanctuary from mouse ears

Orlando’s countless amusement parks, performance spaces, hotels, and mini-golf courses make the sprawling central Florida city into an east coast Las Vegas, albeit one that was hit especially hard by the mid-2000’s subprime mortgage crisis. But a few Downtown O-town local hot spots weathered this economic hurricane and thank goodness for that.

The Social is still standing! And shaking, and grooving, as it continues an energetic tradition as the city’s best place to catch rock, electronic, and weekly acid jazz sets. The midsize venue is mostly built around concerts, but has sustained itself over time by becoming an incredible dance space that keeps the club kids, the rockers, and the Salsa fanatics equally entertained.

–Dan Pfleegor

95. JJ’s Bohemia

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Established: 2007 What You’ll See: That 1 Guy, Thelma and the Sleaze, Future Islands

JJ’s Bohemia is many things, but none of them are chic. A tiny space with a big patio attached (or a big patio with a tiny space, depending on your view), it feels as if every inch of the joint is covered with a sticker, a knick-knack, a string of holiday lights, or the front of a VW van. The vibe is undeniably chaotic, which meshes perfectly with the experience of gathering there for a show — when the stage is inches from your nose and no more than a few feet above you, it’s hard to not feel like a part of rock and roll in the making. Add in the free weekly comedy open mic, bartenders with devoted followers, and a handy disc-golf basket, and you’ve got plenty of reasons to roam off the beaten path.

–Allison Shoemaker

94. Count Basie Theatre

Red Bank, New Jersey

Established: 1926 What You’ll See: Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Kevin Smith

The ‘burbs need concert venues, too, and the Count Basie Theatre caters to the bridge-and-tunnel crowd without making them drive across a bridge or through a tunnel. To that end, there’s something special about seeing legendary, decidedly mature musicians like Brian Wilson and Boz Scaggs right in your Garden State neighborhood, especially when they’re flanked by the Basie’s gorgeously detailed proscenium and celestial blue dome. But such classiness doesn’t drive away the occasional rowdy act: Bruce Springsteen has made several surprise appearances, and fellow Jersey hero Kevin Smith — whose comics shop, Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, is a mere half-mile away — has filmed a handful of his specials there.

–Dan Caffrey

Established: 1989 What You’ll See: Palm trees and great rock and roll

Like so many promoters-turned-club owners, Tim Mays was simply looking for a place to host shows when he opened The Casbah with Bob Bennett and Peter English in 1989. Eventually the venue became a haven for rock and roll of all shapes and sizes, from local heroes (Rocket from the Crypt, Three Mile Pilot) to alternative rock megastars (Nirvana! Smashing Pumpkins! Blink 182!). Now 26 years later, San Diego’s understated rock and roll mecca continues to be everything a small club should be.

With its 200-person capacity, there’s an intimacy to the current room (Mays moved the club up the street in 1994) even when your back’s against the bar. Posters adorning the wall pay homage to the city’s proud underground rock heritage, while the fake palm trees and year-round holiday lights give it the charm of a punk rock bungalow. There’s also music six nights a week, so yeah, it’s more or less a live music maven’s dream come true.

–Ryan Bray

Established: 2007 What You’ll See: Aesop Rock, Todd Barry, Eagulls, Mutual Benefit

The Crofoot is one of downtown Pontiac’s oldest structures. Nowadays, it’s a two-story building that contains three venues: the Crofoot Ballroom, the Pike Room, and the Vernors Room. It’s gone through numerous periods of turbulence in the past two centuries, facing the prospect of demolition as recently as 2005. It was at that time that the McGowan family of local preservationists sought to restore The Crofoot, ultimately leading to its reopening as a concert venue in September 2007.

Regular attendees are pleased to report their happiness about the above-average quality of sound and the politeness of the staff. While it may not draw household-name performers like some venues in Detroit and other areas of Michigan, the modern-day Crofoot’s combination of charm, intimacy, and historical value makes it an often underrated institution.

–Michael Madden

91. Rams Head Live!

Baltimore, Maryland

Established: 2004 What You’ll See: Queens of the Stone Age, Purity Ring, Metric, The New Pornographers

A lot of the best music venues in the US are anchored by their history, but there’s something to be said about what a modern room can be. A great example of this is Rams Head Live!, a concert hall that gets an exclamation mark in its name and doesn’t waste it. What might be most interesting about the space is that it doesn’t have to work with antiquated design.

Two levels of balcony zigzag the crevices of the space, allowing for viewing not just from the front of the stage, but from the side as well. When full, this can boost the energy to feel like the stage is surrounded by fans. History can be earned in time, but for now, Rams Head Live! provides a worthy alternative than traveling to DC for a mid-level band’s club show.

–Philip Cosores

This content was originally published here.

[michaeljtraylor]

Inside the Mets construction of a museum without walls

On October 4, the Met’s photographers and editors digitized Luca della Robbi’s ‘Madonna and Child with Scroll.’

Image: kevin urgiles/mashable

The baby Jesus in Italian sculptor Luca della Robbia’s “Madonna and Child with Scroll” is surprisingly…sassy. Wrapped in his placid mother’s arms, he even seems to be serving a “girl, please” side-eye. His whole figure is full of personality and detail; his baby hands and ears, though porcelain, look chubby enough to bite. Up close — very up close — he even has baby teeth.

On October 4, Joe Coscia, Jr., the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s quiet but devoted chief photographer, undertook the task of capturing the Madonna, and her child with their scroll, digitally. 

“How often do you get to photograph a della Robbia?” Coscia said while he worked. “Maybe once in a lifetime — twice if you’re lucky.”

This is what Coscia and the imaging team do day in and day out: carefully stage, light, photograph, edit, and render the digital files of the Met’s 1.5 million artifacts, and send them off to curators, publishers, and, frequently, the digital department, for publishing online.

SEE ALSO: Bring on museum companion apps — but only if they’re absolutely awesome

Since the creation of the digital division in 2009, the Met — like most cultural institutions — has been proactively wrestling with the question of what it means to be a museum in the digital age. How should the reach of a museum extend beyond its walls? 

Some museums choose to guard and curate their collections online just as they would in their buildings. Others fling open their digital doors, and let go of control over their collections in the name of reaching more people, and enabling further study and creation.

“Now that many people can access representations of museums and objects online, it’s forced museums to really think about what aspect of artwork they think is really special,” Dr. Miriam Posner, an assistant professor of Information Studies at UCLA, said. “Every museum has to decide what its priorities are.”

Zoomed in to the 100 million megapixel photo file, you can see that the “child” has teeth.

Image: KEVIN URGILES/MASHABLE

For the most part, the Met has staked its flag on the side of open access; in 2017, it released 375,000 images of its public domain art objects on its website under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. That means any person can download, use, and change these images however they see fit.

On Thursday, it went further. The Met has now released a public API connecting to over 200,000 open access pieces in its collection. 

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a tool that allow computers to read and analyze a changing set of information. With the Met’s API, researchers, students, social media platforms, or anyone who can run code that interfaces with a digital database, will have access to information about — as the Met’s head of digital, Loic Tallon, is fond of saying— “5,000 years of human history.” 

“In many ways we’ve been working towards this for a while, building on the launch of Open Access,” the Met’s director, Max Hollein, told Mashable. “We hope people will be creative and hands-on with our collection, emboldened to engage with it in new ways, and—through the data that is now available for every object, painting, sculpture in the public domain—we hope there will be a deep exploration of and fresh appreciation for the historical context, beauty, and resources that exist within this unparalleled collection.”

“We hope people will be creative and hands-on with our collection, emboldened to engage with it in new ways.”

The museum is launching the API in partnership with Google, which is using the API to pull these objects into the Google Arts & Culture app and web archive. 

“Every month and every week with technologies advancing, I’m more convinced that technology can make art make a bigger impact in people’s lives,” Simon Delacroix, program manager for Google Arts & Culture in North America, said.

Although the Met’s collection has had an online presence for the last six years, Tallon and his department hope that the API will help the Met’s archive reach a farther and more diverse audience, whether through exposure on Google, Wikipedia, or even through social media platforms. They envision that it will enable the creation of creative research projects about the collection. Somewhat symbiotically, it could even serve as a resource that programmers can use to train A.I. in the development of image recognition programs.

“The museum is really trying to figure out what it means to open its doors in the digital age to make sure it can reach audiences around the world, to make sure it’s putting as few barriers as possible between people around the world and the objects that can inspire them,” Tallon said. “That really is the global aim here.”

Many cultural institutions are establishing their digital presences, whether through all-access APIs or highly curated digital exhibitions, and everything in between. A museum of the Met’s stature devoting its resources to digitization could provide a path forward for other institutions as they walk the tightrope between access and curation. And, together, define what it means to be a museum, online.

Above the Great Hall

Joe Coscia works in a matte black studio in the imaging department, a space directly above the Great Hall that has housed the department since its founding in 1906. Walking through requires navigating around 10-foot high white halves of spheres —  the backside of the museum’s famed domed ceiling. Photographers used to shoot using the natural light from the skylights of the domes, and develop the film on the rooftops of the Met above Fifth Avenue. 

Today, this is where imaging, working hand in hand with digital, help digitize the collection.

The process begins with curators who often request photographs of the objects. Every piece of physical art comes with its own metadata — the artist, the date, or any other descriptors. These are initially written by curators and put into the museum’s content management system, created and managed by Tallon’s digital team.

Then specialized art movers in the Met’s riggers department bring the piece into the studio, if it’s able to be moved. A photographer is assigned, based on their expertise (Joe Coscia loves shooting ceramics and bronze, and does a lot of porcelain). 

Photographers then stage the piece, making sure that the object stands out without getting lost in the shadows. Each surface, whether paint or bronze or marble, has its unique staging and lighting needs. Photographers then capture all the details requested by the curators, as well as whatever they notice on their own.

“Everything’s a challenge, because every single shot is different,” Coscia said.

Coscia works in his dark studio using a Hasselblad camera, shooting in 100 million megapixels that converts raw files into a 600 MB .TIF file. Coscia says the department has always had top of the line cameras, lights, and software, because “this collection absolutely needs the best equipment. The better the equipment, we can make more beautiful pictures of this incredible collection.” Only when zoomed in hundreds of percents on screen do people notice the baby Jesus’ teeth in the della Robbia.

“When you blow it up huge, sometimes you can see fingerprints, you can see all sorts of great things that the artists might have left,” Coscia said. “The curators love it.”

Joe Coscia shoots the della Robbia.

Image: KEVIN URGILES/MASHABLE

Once a photographer has secured the perfect shot, they send it to advanced post-production to get it ready for distribution. 

Heather Johnson is an imaging production assistant. She originally applied to be a museum security guard, but now she has a much different role: editing photographs of objects to make sure, as she says, that objects look in print or on screen just as they do in real life. In service to that mission, shadows are Heather’s nemesis.

“I think the thing that people would be surprised by is how hard it is to make something look like you would see it in real life,” Johnson said. “The first thing I learned here was how to make a shadow look real. Mostly because we’re so used to seeing shadows, that even if you have no sort of technical skills, you can look at an object and be like, something’s off there.”

Heather cleans up the enormous photo files pixel by pixel, which can be both meditative, or a pain. She also makes edits that photographers can’t in real life. The della Robbia came on what Coscia called an “unfortunate” wood pedestal that can’t be removed physically. But Heather can remove it digitally, so the creamy porcelain of Madonna and Child shines against the dramatic gray background, sans ugly wood.

The della Robbia sculpture sits on an ‘unfortunate’ wood pedestal. Advanced photo editors remove features like this in post.

Image: Kevin urgiles/mashable

Once employees like Heather and Joe finish their work, the head of imaging, Barbara Bridgers, hands the baton over to Loic Tallon’s digital team. Under Tallon, the division has 60 employees working on the website and building new digital tools and content. The team running point for the Met’s API is the collections squad, helmed by lead developer Spencer Kaiser. 

“We’re responsible for the collection online, the full stack all the way from the databases that the curators use to catalogue the objects,” Kaiser said. “What you see on the website is what we’ve produced.”

With work on building the API coming to a close, Kaiser’s team is now deep in a multitude of projects, including making the website “sexier,” and building an art timeline, to show what was happening in history during the production of various artworks. His team names their sprints based on constellations; at the time we spoke, they were currently finishing up Tucana.

“This collection absolutely needs the best equipment. The better the equipment, we can make more beautiful pictures of this incredible collection.”

With the API and the ongoing digitization process, Kaiser’s team receives digital files from the imaging team, as well as the metadata from curators. A big challenge for his team (and for digitization as a whole) has been making the format of the metadata consistent, since it comprises pieces that have been catalogued continuously over a century and a half. 

“Having talked to a lot of museum people about their data projects, we’re all super aware of how hard it is to get presentable data from this, and how much effort it takes to make this happen,” UCLA’s Dr. Posner said. 

Organizing databases and programming the API, Kaiser acknowledges that a lot of the technical work is not so different from what any developer making a content management system and API does. The difference is that his team does it at The Met — incidentally, in the same fifth floor space of the museum’s old slide library, where sepia-toned slides of greek statues or European oil paintings are still scattered around the office.

“This type of work, building APIs, can be a similar experience no matter where you are,” Kaiser said. “The real difference is that we get to work with such incredible artworks. The responsibility of getting that out into the world is what really makes a difference for us.”

The old slide library

Loic Tallon works from a standing desk in his office and when he speaks about his work, his words stream out while he simultaneously retrieves supporting documents, or looks up another burgeoning thought online. He recites the full mission statement of The Met at the drop of a hat, so quickly that it seems a talisman rather than a mere collection of words, because he says he is always thinking about the statement and how to best serve it. 

Tallon also works closely with institutions outside of the Met to make the collection easy to access wherever people already are online. The department has a “Wikipedian-in-residence,” who helps integrate the collection into Wikipedia articles. It also works closely with Google’s Arts & Culture platform, which serves as a digital portal to museum collections all over the world. And connecting with these platforms, in the case of the API, is really the next step in the process of digitization.

“It might not be sexy, but from a technical point of view, it’s a big step forward.”

“The Met is more than just a physical space—we share our content with the millions of people who follow us on social media and use our website, and digital platforms give us the ability to reach out even beyond these audiences,” museum director Max Hollein said. “This circles right back to the heart of the Museum’s mission—to connect people with art.”

Google’s own goal of organizing the world’s information works curiously well in tandem with the Met’s mission. That synchronicity is part of what’s made the Met partnership and the API a priority for Google Arts & Culture. “It ties back to the general mission statement of Google,” Delacroix said. “And that’s exactly what we’re doing, and doing it at a new scale, with the help of an API.”

Celebrate Raoul Dufy, born #OnThisDay in 1877. Did you know the French Fauvist painter was also a textile designer? Discover his enduring collaboration with couturier Paul Poiret w/ @metmuseum ➡️ https://t.co/kRR6Vwepyg #GoogleArts pic.twitter.com/OvaBjA0ZZ2

— Google Arts&Culture (@googlearts) June 3, 2018

Prior to the API launch, Google engineers manually uploaded the Met’s work onto its platform. But Delacroix says that that process is slow and painstaking. The API will enable the Google platform to ingest a huge amount of dynamic data at once. And while there were previously 2,000 Met works on Google Arts & Culture, the API swells that number to over 200,000.

“An API allows you to do that at scale in a painless way, because you have these two interfaces communicating, and doing the job for themselves,” Delacroix said. “It might not be sexy, but from a technical point of view, it’s a big step forward.”

“With the API coming out, we’re really assertively going down that route of trying to connect everyone in the world to the Met’s collection,” Tallon said. “Reducing the distance between people and the object that’s relevant to them — that’s the global goal.”

Museums log on

Disseminating art across the globe is not a mission the Met is undertaking alone — far from it. Many institutions, particularly internationally, have gone even further in efforts to digitize much larger collections. 

“It has been happening for some time, digitization,” Thomas Padilla, a digital research services librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies how institutions can improve access for computational research, said. 

An API like the Met’s comes about when the museum decides that it wants to easily enable access and remix culture, or, the ability to create something new from something old. The Met is not the first to achieve this; The American Library of Congress and the European Union’s digital platform for cultural heritage, Europeana, are some of the institutions with an API. The Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum has been a notable leader in mass digitization, and has offered an API since 2011. 

“It’s a more recent development to enable access through APIs or bulk downloading,” Padilla said. “That’s a new chapter that extends and expands the various types of things that people can do with the product of all that digitization effort.”

An API is not the panacea of digitization for all institutions.

But an API is not the panacea of digitization for all institutions. The way that museums have gone about this challenge varies widely. Their approaches depend on the scope of the collection, the financial and personnel resources available, and the institution’s curatorial stance.

“I would never make a blanket statement like everybody has to digitize,” UCLA’s Dr. Posner said. “For some museums, it’s hard enough to keep the lights on.”

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has a specialized collection of European, American, and contemporary art. Its project manager for digital initiatives is Philip Leers, who says that the museum approaches digitization in a similar way that it would approach creating a dynamic, context-filled exhibition, rather than digitizing its whole collection en-masse.

“We create digital resources that highlight parts of our collection that we think are important, or hidden, or that we have something interesting to say about,” Leers said. “It presents us with the opportunity to present the works with fairly rigorous context. We think of this as educational resources, and want to provide more than just images.”

The Hammer creates online versions of its popular and notable exhibitions as well. Leers explained that its 2011-2012 exhibition spotlighting 20th century African-American artists in Los Angeles, Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, was so popular that it preserved it and has expanded its digital archive in the years since. Popularity wasn’t the only factor that went into the online hub’s creation; the Hammer felt that it was important to elevate the visibility of art and a community that had been brushed over for too long.

See documentation from “Now Dig This!” related programs at the Hammer, @MoMAPS1 + @wcmaart → https://t.co/2LqLhcMRXz pic.twitter.com/cBZ2S4pjwI

— Hammer Museum (@hammer_museum) July 18, 2016

The Smithsonian has a different challenge and approach altogether. Compared with the Met’s 1.5 million object collection, the Smithsonian has 155 million objects. Digitization has provided the Smithsonian with the ability to actually make that gargantuan archive accessible, so it has made it a priority. 

“I think it’s a great opportunity, an amazing opportunity,” Diane Zorich, director of Smithsonian’s digitization program office, said. “We have 155 million objects. Less than 1 percent can be exhibited at any time. This gives us an opportunity to make our collections so much more available to people in so many different ways.”

Still, Zorich said that the opportunity is also an obstacle in its own right. “We have a scale challenge that other museums don’t have,” she said. That’s where mass digitization comes in.

For art, design, and scientific sample collections, the Smithsonian has set up systems that involve a huge amount of preparation, but allow for the museum to capture images and create a digital archive much more quickly. It was able to digitize the Smithsonian’s design collection, housed at New York’s Cooper Hewitt, by categorizing objects by size and shape (or, “envelopes”), and using the same production staging for all the items in a given envelope. It even digitized its huge collection of botany samples using an actual conveyer belt.

We’ve hit a huge milestone in digitizing our @NMNH‘s botany collection: 1 million specimens! That’s a lot of 🌿, @SIxDIGI. pic.twitter.com/IaufYuo1s4

— Smithsonian (@smithsonian) March 29, 2017

The Smithsonian and Hammer museums’ approaches to digitization sit on opposite ends of a spectrum, both suited to each institution’s collection and perspective. The Hammer puts out a smaller amount of digital material, but presents it with the same curatorial context that it would in a physical exhibition. The Smithsonian’s mass digitization gives unprecedented access to its collection, but provides the information more as data, and less as “content.”

“Museums are used to doing things slowly and carefully, while the internet is fast-paced and messy, or it can be,” the Hammer’s Leers said. “Some museums are very free and open with their digital presence, and some are more painstaking. I think we’ve kind of erred towards that end of the spectrum.”

“The context versus access debate is a long standing debate that will probably go by the wayside as we move forward,” the Smithsonian’s Zorich said. “It will have to if museums want to stay relevant to their audiences.”

It’s difficult to achieve the best of both worlds, but that’s what the Met is trying to do. Employees like Joe Coscia, Heather Johnson, and Spencer Kaiser ensure that each photograph is beautiful, accurate, and customized; that the metadata is clean, and consistent with the wishes of a curator. 

“The quality of the images should match and equal the quality of the art.”

Of course, they are only able to take this kind of slow care in their work because they have the financial resources and institutional support to do so. The Open Access Initiative is specifically funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“Institutions need money in order to do this stuff, and in order to sustain it, and especially in order to staff the initiatives,” Padilla said. “There is a fair amount of disparity in terms of having the financial resources to staff up and sustain effort in this space.”

Even though the Met went through financial trouble in 2017, which resulted in a new CEO/President, and a new director, digital remained. While Tallon’s digital team employs more than 60 people, digital initiatives have continued to become even more deeply ingrained within multiple departments.

In balancing context and access, some of the Met’s objects online come with more curatorial and educational resources than others. The Met is not shooting for “mass digitization,” but it is going for a holistic digital presence that is reflective of the institution itself. 

“More than ever, we’re responsible for making sure that we’re sending the contents of this institution outward to the world,” the Met’s head of imaging Barbara Bridgers said. “We’ve just always felt that it was imperative that given the breadth and the depth of the collections in the Met, that the quality and the bar, the standard bar, that we use to capture works of art, should be at the very highest. The quality of the images should match and equal the quality of the art.” 

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The Met’s Objects Conservation (@metobjectsconservation) and Imaging Departments (@metimaging) recently collaborated with @Hasselblad and @DJIGlobal to conduct a condition survey of the exterior stone of the Fuentidueña Apse, a 12th-century structure originally part of the church of San Martín in Spain, now residing at @TheMetCloisters. The 3,300 blocks of limestone were documented utilizing a Hasselblad camera on a DJI drone. Photo: @joseph.coscia #TheMet #MetCloisters

A post shared by The Met (@metmuseum) on Oct 15, 2018 at 2:34pm PDT

Buried treasure

This August, the Met reunited all 16 of its famous Van Gogh paintings — irises, wheat fields, self-portraits and all — in one gallery. These paintings are usually on loan at exhibitions around the world. 

But even before they reached the Met, they criss-crossed the world throughout the centuries. Thanks to digitization, that journey has been uncovered and visualized for anyone to learn from while they take in the paintings in the gallery.

“There are a lot of stories to be found in this data that you might not see in any exhibition,” Parsons professor Richard The told Mashable.

An API is all well and good, but what can it actually do? The Met’s undertaking is yielding, especially with the API, new ways to both access and understand the cultural legacy it contains. 

“There are a lot of stories to be found in this data that you might not see in any exhibition.”

Richard The leads a graduate course in data visualization at Parsons. Last year, his students used the Met’s collection data as the bases for their projects. One student made a dynamic, interactive map of where the Van Gogh paintings traveled before they arrived in New York; another plotted how many objects of different metals like gold or silver reside in the Met.

Dr. Posner’s UCLA students work with data from cultural institutions to find stories about the art and objects, yes, but also to reflect on how we as a culture have chosen what to canonize and memorialize about ourselves.

“There’s this whole other side of art that’s really all about information, and can be investigated by looking at trends, artists, nationalities, or genders,” Posner said. “So when you look at those aspects of a collection that can be expressed as data, you can see trends that turn out to be important, but which can’t necessarily be deduced just by looking at individual artworks.”

“You can’t really anticipate all of the types of uses that someone might want to make of a collection,” Padilla said. “Rather than trying to anticipate all of that, you can create an API, and that gives users the ability to remix collections, or even create new forms of access.”

That is exactly how the Met hopes people will come to the collection, now that it’s more accessible and machine-readable than before: with a fresh perspective that they might not have thought of themselves. 

Channeled some internet-buzz energies into this @Wikipedia stub on signature quilts. This quilt has 350 signatures including those of eight US presidents. I can show it to you b/c @metmuseum put a CC0 @creativecommons license on it. Thank you! https://t.co/10jcD9NERX pic.twitter.com/B59wWRpVbU

— jessamyn west (@jessamyn) June 14, 2018

Tallon also hopes the API and digitization as a whole enables art to become more seamlessly integrated with everyday life.

“There’s no rule for how you have to engage in this content,” Tallon said. “The dream scenario is every time someone goes online, they see an object from the Met’s collection, and they don’t even realize it’s an object from the Met’s collection. It’s the inspiration point somewhere.”

Tallon envisions .gif keyboards populated with della Robias or Rodins, Pinterest boards filled with patterns from ancient ceramics and fabrics. 

“I’m not kidding when I say everyone’s life would be that much better if you woke up and saw a beautiful image of something from around the world, and be able to serve up the image that best serves someone’s mood or personality at the time,” Tallon said. “I think we can do that. And then if people want to dive deeper, and get some more interpretive content, then great. If they just want to be inspired and just think differently for a fraction of their day, god bless too.”

The walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are always changing.

Image: H. William Tetlow/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A museum without walls

Barbara Bridgers’ office is warm in comparison to the concrete technical space of the rest of the imaging department. It has a wall covered in old motherboards, previously left on her desk by employees who figured she would know what to do with them (she did not); curiously, it comprises a sloping concrete ledge, which is really the remnants of a one-time museum wall. 

“This was a former external wall of the building,” Bridgers explained, gesturing. “When they were finishing up my office, they called me and said, well, you have a ledge.”

As technology has advanced, museums including the Met have had to decide what the scope of a museum should be. 

The choice is not absolute, but institutions like the Met, Hammer, and Smithsonian make judgments about and allocate precious resources toward whether to tear down an institution’s walls, or create a more dynamic space within. 

“Putting art on the walls is always going to be what museums do,” the Hammer’s Leers said. “But for a first time in a while, [digital] is putting a broad array of possibilities in front of us, and asking us to choose. Which can be uncomfortable, and scary, and exciting.”

“We’re more than a building now.” 

As with the original wall in Bridgers’ office, the Met has chosen to keep the foundation of the institution in tact, while expanding around the center, in order to ultimately transcend any physical space. The light-filled Greek and Roman sculpture gallery will always house figures from the West’s cultural roots. But the purposes of the former slide library and imaging department above will change and grow, and the people who dive deepest into the collection won’t necessarily work within the Met’s walls.

“I’m sure if you asked the people who founded the museum in the 1870s, their aim was to make the collection accessible by putting it on public display, quite literally,” Tallon said. “The technologies and opportunities, what it means to make something accessible, has changed so much. Even just the idea of what a museum is, what the Met is. We’re more than a building now.”

WATCH: You no longer have to go to Italy to study these 300 museum artifacts up close

Read more: https://mashable.com/article/the-met-museum-api/

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[insideanairport]

Aeron Bergman,  Alejandra Salinas: Telepathy 传心术 (2018) by INCA Press

❍❍❍

Telepathy 传心术 is an amazing book on the intersection of art and neoliberalism. The book is part of a series titled distinction, after Pierre Bourdieu's iconic book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. A must-read book [for all artists] about the connection of ‘Judgement of taste' and class.

Bergman and Salinas's objective is political and work-centered. They are interested to highlight the distinction between art and neoliberalism in a sociological way. What happens to the greater field of art (artworks, artists, institutions, etc.) under the contemporary dominance of neoliberal hegemony? A similar attempt was made from a cultural stand (rather than a socio-economical stand) in 2012 by Nikos Papastergiadis under the title, Cosmopolitanism and Culture by Polity Press.    

Throughout the book, Bergman and Salinas are referring to neoliberalism as 'neoliberal capitalism’. In some parts, it seems like there are no differences between neoliberalism and capitalism. In other parts, it seems like 'neoliberal capitalism’ is a bigger hybrid monster that is made out of the two (occasionally replacing it with hyper-competition, Kleptomanism, Parasitoid démarche, etc.).

As artists and art writers, they stand next to their contemporaries such as Groys, Osborne and Bishop. In terms of political economy, history and philosophy, they are referring to Aihwa One, Philip Mirowski, Chin-Tao Wu, Reymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, Hanna Arendt and Georg Simmel. In their critical analysis, they are attacking F.A. Hayek -a right-wing European conservative asshole economist- who is brilliantly introduced in the book as ’neoliberalism’s founding thinker’. Hayek’s 1944 book, Road to Serfdom is mentioned as the main intellectual originator of today’s neoliberal ideology. Hayek’s political philosophy is extremely individualist and anti-socialist. Similar to other western colonial libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Garrett Hardin, Hayek is pro-competition, and in favor of private property, free market enterprise and minimal government. He also believes that individualism has created the Western civilization and therefore it has to be preserved and flourished (from the dangers of communism and socialism).

Hayek can be seen as the exact opposite of John Maynard Keynes. Although, as an essentialist, Hayek believed that Nazism was a ’necessary’ outcome of socialism -rather than a 'reaction' to socialism! Like many other European essentialists, he biasedly saw Naziism as a totalitarian socialist movement rather an ultra-nationalist racist movement made to establish the Aryan white race on top of the human pecking order through military force.

Bergman and Salinas cleverly connect the inception of neoliberal ideology to Hayek and the post-war Europe where individualism and market freedom was sold to people as an alternative to other modes of governmentality. The notion of 'being free', 'freedom of movement' and 'freedom of choice' is crucial for them. Out of David Harvey’s neoliberalism, they have discovered another monster that to me seems somehow bigger and mightier. Maybe, from the art and cultural perspective, the situation is more depressing than it seems (something that Chin-Tao Wu argued in Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980’s). Neoliberalism is presented like a huge whirlpool that drags everything cultural inside of it, and along with it race and gender are also sucked in to disappear. Racism here is presented as an outcome of this neoliberal whirlpool, or a signifier of its existence. This class-conscious point of view is so strong that it might dismiss the other forms of social racism, just to blame everything on the neoliberal capitalism and the ruling class that is enforcing it. On the other hand, social racism is not the object of this book, unless it intersects with the neoliberal ideology.

The power of the book lies in the ability to introduce interesting terminology that connects the challenges of cultural production to market-driven business ideas. The writers introduce and dissect phenomena such as the genius artist (Genii), WEIRD art, Vile Maxim (Adam Smith), Skilled versus Deskilled artist, Aesthetics of psychopathy, Pseudo-collaborations and the Law of Janteloven in art. The section on The Law of Janteloven is my personal favorite, firstly because I didn’t know anything about it. And Secondly, due to my experiences in the art field, especially in the last 2 years. Instead of trying to describe it, I decided to quote the whole section of the book here:    

P. 170 Norwegian Janteloven is a strange, related phenomena: it is hyggeling, (cozy), to be well-adjusted to majority opinion! Janteloven promotes nationalist group hegemony as a cover-up to buttress the usual hegemonic structures. Hostility towards difference is implemented across all social classes as a hands-off, efficient form for a self-policing population. The concept of Janteloven comes from the Danish Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 book, En flyktning krysser sitt spor. He captured the oppressive spirit of social adhesion so closely that Janteloven is now in the general vocabulary of Scandinavia. Here are a few key Laws of Jante, the unspoken moral operative: 

"You’re not to think you are smarter than us. You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than us. You’re not to think you are good at anything. You’re not to laugh at us. You’re not to think anyone cares about you. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.”

Who is the us and who is the you in this law? In the case of a foreigner, person of color, and person of nonconforming gender in Norway, this you is easy to identify and developed with oppression in mind. However, in the case of white, heterosexual, male Norwegian, who is you and who is us? You is anyone who judges and acts as an individual using judgement without bannisters. You is anyone who decides that a particular majority taste is disgusting.

Janteloven is expressed in the art ecosystem too: Norway’s hippest, taste-making, popular art gallery is fittingly called Standard, and shows mostly mute, vacant work of self-censuring formalism, completely drained of any threatening content and difference…While it is sometimes argued internally that Janteloven is the reason that there are no 3 Michelin starred restaurants in Norway, in fact, Janteloven is used by Norway to promote itself as the most equal society on earth. It is dark comedy: “more-equal does not mean “equal”, and in fact, Norway is in the top 5 among industrial nations with the fastest increase of social inequality.  

Bergman and Salinas are great in finding hidden problematics in the international art ecosystem and its institutions from Whitney biannual (and its racism and whiteness), Detroit and Seattle art scene (with its billionaire elite) to Norway (with its state-funded educational projects of homogenization that tries to be more equal than all, resulting in significant inequality).

P.110 "Art displaying ambiguous is not always produced, by the artist, primarily for this purpose. Furthermore, ambiguism is often agreeable, enjoyable and legitimately entertaining, rich, full, smart, and fun. This is the result of appealing to the widest base -- and it is therefore difficult to simply dismiss all together. Ambiguism is, after all, the contemporary art of our time.”

In terms of opposition to neoliberalism, they identify religion as a force –not the spiritual/meditative personal type of religion, rather the large religious organizations and governments. The ending chapter of the book presents a question; “if health in fact can be a possible strategy for protest?” Later they identify self-health and aesthetics of health (such as Hollywood yoga and Feng shui) as a sort of market-conformism or extreme nihilism.    

p.23 In the 21st century there are very few fields that develop and utilize value systems parallel to the ruling theology of today: neoliberal capitalism. Two prominent fields that are sometimes capable of such opposition are religion (irony of ironies) and science (not the corporate version.) 

Examples of religious opposition to neoliberal capitalism include Pope Francis' statement to the Wall Street Journal that "capitalism is terrorism against all humanity." Rabbi Jonathan Sacks also spoke out: "Humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind." Another powerful example of religious opposition is the Sharia compliant Islamic finance system practiced by Iran, Malaysia, and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a growing banking system outlawing rent-seeking via usury, or ‘riba’.

The book is very insightful and would perpetuate an economic understanding of the effects of neoliberalism on art. On the other hand, it is missing the current negative ‘reactions' that has risen (whether by states or by individual groups/communities) in response to neoliberalism. The example of Norway (Law of Janteloven) was the closest that the book came across these issues, yet not only this problem was presented as ‘cultural’ but the blame was laid solely on neoliberalism which is penetrating into different countries one after another.

Scandinavia is a great example in this case, where the rise of nationalism, racism and fascism seem to be connected to the fear of eroding national sovereignty or the gradual disappearance of the social welfare system. Denmark, for example, is implementing ‘forced assimilation’ to its Muslim migrant population along with fifty other cruel laws on immigration to preserve its Danishness. A mixture of right-wing racism and left-wing strive for a sovereign nation (against neoliberalism) that sometimes leads to nationalism and race-blindness. Wendy Brown presented this idea in her 2010 book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. She mentioned these events as ‘reactionary’ to neoliberalism rather than caused directly by it. ‘Walls’ she said, "are often amount to little more than theatrical props, frequently breached, and blur the distinction between law and lawlessness that they are intended to represent. But if today's walls fail to resolve the conflicts between globalization and national identity, they nonetheless project a stark image of sovereign power.” Étienne Balibar talks about similar issues in regard to the history of left conservatism leading to nationalism: “...every 'social state' in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including the socialist state, has been not only a national state, but a nationalist state also.” (Race, nation, classe. Les Identités ambiguës)

Similar to this case, but reversely, in 1944 Hayek blamed socialism for the creation of the Nazi Party in Germany. Unlike his contemporaries he didn’t see Naziism as a ‘reaction’ to socialism, rather he saw it as a ‘necessary' outcome of socialism. Therefore, he laid the blame on the originator of a reactionary hate movement. He didn't see the hate movement itself as an underlying issue deep into the society. A sort of issue that only comes up in the times of crisis.

[zachwhitworth]

The New PSU Art Museum That No One Asked For

Whether Portland State University students like it or not, Neuberger Hall will be undergoing major renovation over the next couple years. The building’s completion is projected for August 2019, leaving its former academic occupants displaced until then. Some students were not aware of this renovation until only recently, even though the project was publicly announced in late Spring 2017. While students are still relatively in the dark regarding the renovation overall, the inclusion of a new art museum in this project has been a seriously overlooked and forgotten detail.

While announcements of Neuberger Hall’s renovation have kept the addition of an art museum in the project as a side note, it is not an addition that should be downplayed. Upon its completion, the museum will occupy 7,500 square feet between the building’s lower two floors, featuring entrances on both the South Park Blocks and SW Broadway. Admission will be free to students and the public.

The museum will be under the name of Jordan Schnitzer, the real-estate developer and art collector who donated $5 million toward the renovation. Schnitzer’s reputation in the regional art world is seemingly second to none, being that he is one of the largest art patrons in the Pacific Northwest and personally holds a collection of over 10,000 fine art prints. If you aren’t familiar with Jordan Schnitzer, you still may have seen the names of his parents, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer. Among the family’s long history of arts patronage, their names mark the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s main building, the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown, and the Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize offered annually at PSU. Though hailing from a powerful family legacy, Jordan Schnitzer himself has played a significant role in the Northwest’s art culture, having donated or lent artwork to many key art institutions in the area.

If you’ve visited the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, you may also recognize Schnitzer’s name. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is UO’s flagship art center, placed under the name following the museum’s expansion during the 1990s with Schnitzer’s donation.

PSU will not be the second university with a museum Jordan Schnitzer has his name on either. Washington State University in Pullman currently has its art museum under renovation, re-opening this April as yet another Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Both museum administrations in Eugene and Pullman have been discussing how they can differentiate from one another and navigate separate publicity.

As if that weren’t enough, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported in June 2017 that Schnitzer is “in talks for a fourth Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Corvallis, at Oregon State University”. This means Neuberger Hall will shelter the third of four JSMAs.

Jordan Schnitzer aside, it is difficult to speculate exactly what this new museum will mean for PSU and its students. The museum will be sharing floors with the student service offices on the first floor, also squeezing in with the classrooms and art studios on the second floor. It will be integrated with everyday campus life, not existing as just a solitary entity.

Is this a good thing? Many schools have art museums, so it may only be natural that PSU is trying to follow suit, but students certainly did not ask for one. Though only time will tell, university art museums too often are notorious for ignoring their students.

A university museum is as much an institution as an independent city museum, and its place within a school setting invites another level of bureaucracy. It is an institution inside an institution. This setup positions university museums to function both as their own separately-managed entities and as school-administered organizations.

One of the major necessities for any museum is money to operate, and the approach to funding varies from campus to campus. Some receive much of their money through their respective universities, but many more tend to be primarily reliant on grants and generous patronage. A museum can lose much of its funding if its university faces financial difficulties or has not budgeted properly, leaving them to look to outside communities. A museum would have to operate with grants that require targeting an audience consisting mostly of non-students, and fundraising efforts are directed similarly.

During the June 7, 2017 press conference addressing the Neuberger Hall renovation and JSMA inclusion, the museum’s budget was briefly mentioned. “Included in this gift is an amount to establish a funded endowed museum director position,” said Schnitzer. “We got the university to commit to a budget to operate the museum, so it will be funded and be able to operate”. However, no specifics of that budget were included.

Though the museum and director position were said to be initially paid for, there has been no mention of the long-term sustainability. Even if PSU has agreed to an operational budget, where will that money come from? PSU is showing they have already abandoned the JSMA through this unclear beginning, and as with any campus museum, abandonment by the university always leads to reliance on outside fundraising.

Art museums on college campuses are fundraising machines. Yes, they are spaces for art, but they are also honey to wealthy potential donors. While campus museums sometimes offer free admission, there are normally membership rates identical to city museums. The JSMA in Eugene has its membership ranging from $45 to upwards of $1000, and that’s pretty standard. There are even “patron circles” consisting of the most elite donors who give between $1500 and $5000. While campus museums tend to offer student membership rates that are heavily discounted, it’s the most basic membership. Outside patrons who are willing to pay through the nose are yielded an assortment of perks, of course including an invitation to VIP museum parties.

Because university art museums normally appeal to this crowd, they find themselves competing with city museums. Neuberger Hall is only a short walk from the Portland Art Museum, raising questions of the need for a museum at PSU and how the proximity of the two museums will affect one another. A trend at university museums is a desire for recognition from the larger art world, and it reflects in their programming. A museum could go to great lengths to feature work by majorly popular artists, much like University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery did in 2016 when it held a massive (and controversial) Paul McCarthy sculpture exhibition.

The new JSMA may challenge PAM, and it will certainly create difficulties for existing art spaces at PSU as well. While the JSMA will essentially be replacing Neuberger Hall’s Autzen Gallery, there are still five other galleries on campus. The student-run Littman and White Galleries in Smith Memorial Student Union will have their decades-old roles as PSU’s core contemporary art galleries placed on the line, and the JSMA’s larger presence is poised to threaten their continued existence.

There is always potential for problems to manifest from university museums. Though this can appear as competitiveness with other art spaces, it’s not always obvious. A museum administration might waste money on over-the-top campaigns or artworks, compromise their budget to host bigger shows, or take advantage of student and non-student employees. The institution-within-an-institution setup does not often yield transparency, keeping internal conflicts and controversy behind closed doors. University museums are well-insulated and shielded by both their institutions and their own reputations as cultural centers. That unique positioning also makes them tough to openly criticize, leaving mistreated employees to risk art world alienation and their careers if they opt to call out an irresponsible or corrupt lead curator/director.

The non-transparent nature of these institutions-within-institutions is primed to spark rumors. The lack of details available regarding the new JSMA have left PSU students with no way to expect what exactly they’re getting when Neuberger Hall eventually re-opens. It has led to speculations based on what little information individual faculty have been able to offer when students ask about the situation.

One such speculation that has been in the air came about after the June 7, 2017 press conference. “[The JSMA] is going to provide, I understand, a recurring point of access to the extraordinary Jordan D. Schnitzer print collection,” said Pat Boas, Director of the School of Art + Design. The vague words were interpreted by some as suggesting Schnitzer’s extensive collection would be partially stored in Neuberger Hall, as storing and maintaining artwork is standard at other university museums.

Upon recent inquiry, the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation addressed this concern via email. “The Foundation has no operational connection to the museum and therefore will not be storing work from its private collections at the PSU museum,” stated Catherine Malone, the JSFF Collection Manager. “We look forward to collaborating with PSU staff in the future to bring exhibitions from the JSFF collections to the museum on a prearranged basis. Unfortunately we are unable to provide ‘access’ in a broader sense due to privacy, staffing, and insurance concerns.” This clarification did not answer all the remaining questions about the JSMA, but it is reassuring to have at least one speculation dispelled.

Will the museum be a positive or negative addition to PSU? It is hard to say for sure until Neuberger Hall reopens and the museum kicks off, but the minimal details available leave the whole project tasting bad. When it opens, students and faculty need to hold the museum accountable. Negative signs must be recognized and managed in order for it to actually be beneficial to the people paying to attend this institution.

To avoid the downfalls and messy business of other university museums, the JSMA has to steer clear of emulating them. Hosting VIP parties and exclusive events is a sign of catering to wealthy patrons, allowing those with money to sway the path of the museum’s programming away from student interests. Students need to be a priority, not big-name popular artists or sensationalized exhibitions. Student artwork must be given regular space like the Autzen Gallery formerly provided.

The entire PSU student body overall should never see a new museum fee when receiving tuition bills either. The total costs of attending PSU have increased too much to be adding on yet another expense. Since the university claims to have agreed on an operational budget, it should not require an additional charge to students.

To get it right, this new museum will have to value student-oriented programming above all else. School of Art + Design MFA students should be welcomed to display their work, and undergraduate seniors should at least have access to the museum for their thesis exhibitions. An Art + Design faculty biennial exhibition should be hosted by the JSMA as well, especially considering it is common practice at many other university art museums, and it is important for students to be exposed to their own instructors’ work in that type of formal environment.

These requirements have to supplement other shows and programming, of course. What isn’t student or faculty art should be largely experimental. The unique positioning of university museums within their respective institutions primes them for exhibiting material that is out-of-the-box and might be out-of-place at a standard art museum. These shows must facilitate conversation and make radical efforts to engage with non-art students. As a multi-use art center, the JSMA needs to adopt the mindset and operational values of the student-centered art galleries it aims to replace, or any serious care for contemporary art at PSU will fade away.

This new art museum will bring a big change to PSU when it is eventually unveiled. It is set to integrate itself into campus life, which will either be wholesome or detrimental. The fronting of the project by Jordan Schnitzer raises questions of who and what the museum will really be for, and PSU’s release of very few details sustains the uncertainty and skepticism surrounding it. Establishing a university museum may be an invaluable cultural and educational addition to PSU, but it also invites new levels of institutional politics. If the JSMA travels down the wrong path, the result will be a huge waste of money and space at student expense. It would be unwise to underestimate this museum.

[thedeadshotnetwork]

Epic Ink: How Japanese Warrior Prints Popularized the Full-Body Tattoo By Hunter Oatman-Stanford In the late 1820s, when artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi debuted his stunning new series of warrior prints, Japanese culture was well into a period of flux. Since around 1615, after the ruling Tokugawa family established their headquarters in Edo (the former name for Tokyo), the country had been set on a course of rapid urbanization and isolation from the global order. The private wealth of Japan’s thriving merchant class fueled the emergence of the so-called Floating World—shadowy urban districts devoted to nightlife and entertainment—and a host of media chronicling its hedonistic delights. In response, the country’s leaders passed laws to curb the spread of illicit activity and establish new standards of decency. “Tattoos were for the fashionable urban commoners, not usually people of a high social level.” Kuniyoshi released his action-packed illustrations, inspired by the characters of a popular Chinese martial-arts novel, amid this social turmoil. But unlike previous illustrators who stuck closely to the text, Kuniyoshi made a key change, adorning several of the story’s heroes with elaborate, large-scale tattoos. In doing so, he merged fantasy and decorative art to create a breathtaking new style of body modification. By transforming a few brief mentions of tattoos in the source material into a vibrant feature of his prints, Kuniyoshi produced a cultural touchstone that remains influential more than a century after his death. Tattooing existed in Japan well before the Edo Period: Small tattoos of words or text were sometimes applied when a person took a romantic or religious vow, or were forcibly given to criminals to remind others of their transgressions. But as with other areas of Japanese life, the disruptive social shifts of the Edo Period transformed tattoos from basic lettering into a complex art form. Top: “Zhu Gui, the Dry-land Crocodile” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the series “108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin,” reprinted c. 1843–47. Above, a print by Kitagawa Utamaro I entitled “Onitsutaya Azamino and Gontarō, a Man of the World” depicting a courtesan applying a tattooed name, c. 1798-99. ©  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . During the 1790s, government censors began cracking down on books and prints to discourage works that celebrated the vices of the Floating World. As a direct result, publishers focused on fictional stories with historic settings and lots of action, including the 14th-century Chinese book Shuihuzhuan , or “ Water Margin ,” whose Japanese translations had already been popular for decades. As the mythical tale of Chinese vigilantes living on a mountain surrounded by wild marshland (hence the book’s title), Water Margin , or Suikoden, as it was titled in Japanese, fit perfectly into this trendy new genre of historic fiction. The novel’s first Japanese translation appeared in episodic segments between 1757 and 1790, and instantly inspired other adaptations. Similar to the 20th-century  Marvel Universe , authors and illustrators repurposed characters and plotlines from Water Margin  for a variety of media over the course of several generations. The story’s most famous translation, A New Illustrated Edition of Water Margin , debuted in 1805, with original text by Kyokutei Bakin and illustrations by Katsushika Hokusai. Though conflicts between Bakin and Hokusai forced the publisher to pause production, more than a decade later, Utagawa Kuniyoshi was inspired by this version to create his series, “108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin,” released to great acclaim in the late 1820s. As Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator Sarah E. Thompson explains in her book, Tattoos in Japanese Prints , Kuniyoshi took a few references to the tattoos of four characters and made them a prominent feature of his elaborate artwork. “In the illustrations of Chinese editions of the book, which Hokusai followed closely in his own versions, the tattoos are relatively simple line drawings,” Thompson writes. “Kuniyoshi, however, created extravagant, complex prints-within-prints, filled with color and action.” Of the 75 different heroes Kuniyoshi included in his unfinished series, 15 were depicted with large pictorial tattoos. Many of these tattoos include imagery drawn from the natural world—waterfalls, lions, snakes, peonies, monkeys, octopi, fish—while others show fantastic creatures and gods. Though earlier Water Margin prints had been popular with the public, Kuniyoshi’s series was such a massive hit that it established a entirely new genre of printmaking— musha-e or warrior prints—and made its tattooed subjects into style icons for many fans. After the Water Margin illustrations launched Kuniyoshi to fame, he continued producing artwork of the ukiyo-e school, or imagery of the Floating World. Many of these prints featured kabuki performers, a group of all-male celebrities that often donned fake tattoos for certain roles, and such portraits served to increase the visibility and popularity of bodysuit-style tattoos. It’s unclear how much Kuniyoshi’s art was influenced by actual tattoos, rather than simply his imagination, but regardless, his inked protagonists inspired countless copycat characters, artwork featuring tattooed subjects, and real-world tattoos in the decades following. “Not only were the tattoos that Kuniyoshi designed for the heroes copied in real life, but also the heroes themselves became the subjects for tattoos,” Thompson writes. We recently spoke with Thompson about the appearance of tattoos in Japanese art and the flowering of their real-world counterparts. A hand-colored photograph of a tattooed Japanese laborer by Felice Beato, circa 1880s. Via Wikimedia. Collectors Weekly: What are the first records of tattoos in Japan? Sarah E. Thompson : The earliest records of any tattooing going on in Japan are actually from Chinese history books of the 3rd century C.E., which include accounts of travelers who went to a place that is most likely Japan. One of those mentions that people had tattoos in that country. But the large-scale pictorial tattoos that we know today seem to have originated sometime around the beginning of the 19th century, and it’s not exactly clear how it happened. There was a shift from small tattoos—either given as some kind of mark to punish criminals or when someone made a vow to a lover or a deity—to these big, gorgeous pictorial tattoos that look like some kind of bodysuit. Small tattoos that symbolized a vow would be more acceptable, especially if they were religious, but in general, tattoos were for the fashionable urban commoners, not usually people of a high social level. Collectors Weekly: What led to the emergence of the so-called “Floating World”? Thompson : The Edo Period, which was roughly 1615 to 1868, is often described as the early modern period in Japan. During that time there was a major shift from a feudal society, in which your position was determined by birth, toward a more modern type of society, where your social status is mainly a matter of how much money you have. In this print by Utagawa Kunisada, c. 1862, actor Bando Kamezo I brandishes a cooking knife as the character Oni “Demon” Keisuke; his tattoos depict the oniazami weed, also known as “demon thistle.” ©  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . Theoretically, the official class system was divided into four social classes, according to the neo-Confucian ideology of the rulers. At the top were the military rulers or the samurai, and the next most important were the peasants, because their labor was essential, and then the artisans who made useful things. The lowest of the four classes was the merchants because they didn’t do anything except shift money around. But in practice, the rich merchants were often better off than the poorer samurai. However, there were legal limitations to what you could do with that money: If you were not a samurai, you couldn’t be involved in government or travel outside Japan, and even travel within Japan was somewhat restricted. So there were quite a lot of people with money to spend, and they spent it on this popular culture in the Floating World, which was a general term encompassing all the urban pleasures—the kabuki theater, the legal brothels, restaurants, fashion stores, all kinds of things. The name Floating World described this world of transient, ephemeral pleasures. Collectors Weekly: What visual records do we have from this period? Thompson : We have quite a lot of visual documentation from woodblock prints and book illustrations, which were created by the same artists. The pictorial woodblock prints were actually an offshoot of book publishing, which became a big business during the Edo Period. The Japanese had been printing for a long time, though it had mostly been done in the Buddhist context. But during the Edo Period, you have this increase in urbanization and the population who could be defined as middle class, plus a rise in literacy rates. In the bigger cities, there were enough people who could read or at the very least had friends who could read to them, so there was a growing market for popular reading matter. “Firefighters were very likely to have tattoos, often of dragons because they’re water creatures, so it was an implicit prayer that the dragons would rain on the fire.” The earliest printed materials were mostly versions of classical literature, but pretty quickly publishers started getting authors to write stories about new subjects like the Floating World. In terms of woodblock prints, those were a spin-off from book publishing roughly around 1680, when they started selling single-sheet pictures as a separate product line. People would pin or glue these prints to their walls and throw them away when they got tired of them. Fortunately for us, some people liked them enough to save their prints even if they weren’t really meant to be saved. People who did keep them often pasted them into albums—they were glued together, perhaps with prints back to back, and then bound together. You could also do it in scroll form, or as an accordion-folded type of book. That’s the way a lot of things survived. “Hayakawa Ayunosuke,” from the series “800 Hundred Heroes of the 
Japanese Water Margin” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. 1830. The historic Japanese figure is shown here with a dragon-themed bodysuit tattoo, which the actual Hayakawa certainly did not have. ©  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . Collectors Weekly: What were the subjects of these print series? Thompson : What was written about in books and what was illustrated with prints typically went hand in hand. Especially in the 18th century, there were a number of works of fiction about what went on in the Floating World—love affairs between rich playboys and courtesans, that kind of thing. There was also a substantial amount of nonfiction, travel guides, how-to books, and there was still classical literature in addition popular literature. There were critiques of courtesans and kabuki actors, maps, all types of things. In the 1790s, there was a bit of a crackdown with the Kansei Reforms, a set of laws that tried to make people less frivolous and more moral. Moving into the beginning of the 19th century, there was a tendency for popular authors to avoid stories about present-day life and look at more distant history instead. As you know, Water Margin , which was Kuniyoshi’s first hit series, was based on a translation of a Chinese novel from several centuries earlier. But Japanese authors also wrote other adventure stories inspired by it, spin-offs set during different periods of Japanese history. To a large extent, the authors were trying to create something that would sell well and was still acceptable to the government. Italian photographer Adolfo Farsari captured this portrait of a tattooed horse groom around 1886. A warrior figure is clearly illustrated on the groom’s upper back. Via  Pitt Rivers Museum . Collectors Weekly: Were there illustrations of large pictorial tattoos before Water Margin became popular? Thompson : Yes, there are a few, which is interesting. Some people think that Kuniyoshi’s Water Margin series started it all, but I think there were large-scale tattoos being done before that. Interestingly enough, much of the evidence is in early prints by Kuniyoshi himself. He had been active as an artist for 10 years or so when he finally had this big hit with the Water Margin series in the late 1820s. But if you look at some of Kuniyoshi’s own works from earlier in the 1820s, you find images of men with those types of large tattoos. In one of the early Kuniyoshi prints in the MFA’s current show , there’s a little inset showing a fishmonger cutting up a fish and he has tattoos. We can’t date that exactly, but judging from the style, it looks as if it’s from the early 1820s, a few years before he did the Water Margin series. There’s also a well-known triptych where Kuniyoshi shows a group of men making a pilgrimage to a sacred waterfall, and when they get into the water, many of the men have tattoos. I think the trend for pictorial tattoos had started already, though we could credit Kuniyoshi with taking it to a new level of artistic value and making it something that would really last. But I’m still collecting evidence for this. This print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Great Falls of Sekison at Ôyama,” shows several male bathers with tattoos on their arms and backs, seen mostly as vague grey coloring, c. 1830s. Via Wikimedia. (click to enlarge) Collectors Weekly: How was the Water Margin story absorbed into Japanese culture? Thompson : There had been Water Margin translations going back to the 18th century, and you see references to it sometimes in print, but it seems to have been something that only Sinophile intellectuals knew about. Then there was this popular translation in the early 19th century, which was illustrated by Hokusai. That seems to have made the story really famous, although there’s a bit of a gap between the first part of the translation coming out and the time when Kuniyoshi did his prints in the late 1820s. Hokusai’s original illustrations did include tattooed characters, but he drew the tattoos as fairly simple outlines, rather than the elaborate designs Kuniyoshi illustrated. Most of Kuniyoshi’s heroes were not shown with tattoos and that seems to reflect reality—even when tattoos were very popular, they were still only popular for a minority of people. These images were supposed to represent 12th-century China, but we don’t know much about tattoos at that time, other than the fact that they did exist because they are actually mentioned in the original book, Shuihuzhuan . Four of the 108 heroes were specifically said to have had tattoos, and Kuniyoshi put tattoos on 15 of them. Collectors Weekly: What types of tattoos did Kuniyoshi depict? Thompson : Lions and peonies were very common, and this gave the warriors a mildly exotic look since, of course, there were no lions in Japan, or in China either, for that matter. You see them in Buddhist art because that ultimately came from India where there are real lions, but for the Japanese at this time, they were almost imaginary animals used as symbols of courage. Dragons were also very popular, and other mythical creatures like giant snakes. Often a hero is depicted fighting a monster. There’s another story that crops up a lot about a diving woman who steals a jewel back from the Dragon King, and you see her swimming along, being chased by water creatures. Occasionally, you see something like a courtesan in her full elaborate costume, parading down the street, but that is a bit unusual. Usually, it’s something more violent, something with a lot of action. “Yan Qing, the Graceful” is adorned with tattoos of lions, peonies, and waterfalls in this print from the series “108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. late 1820s and reprinted around 1843-47. ©  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . Collectors Weekly: Did Kuniyoshi’s series spawn a lot of imitations? Thompson : It was his Water Margin series that made the warrior prints, or musha-e , a major new genre of subject matter—right up there with beautiful women and kabuki actors. Just a few years later, Hokusai did the same thing for landscape prints when he brought out his “36 Views of Mount Fuji” series, which was also a huge hit. Kuniyoshi was great at the warrior prints, and he continued to be the main artist doing them, but other artists created them as well. Kuniyoshi himself brought out a second series of Japanese heroes and put tattoos on some of them, even though it wasn’t necessarily historically appropriate. So their depictions aren’t only connected to the Water Margin . Collectors Weekly: During the Edo Period, do you think tattoos were more common in prints than in reality? Thompson : Possibly. It’s hard to say. By the time you get into the later Meiji Era and foreign tourists were running around photographing people, there certainly were a fair number of tattoos. They’re typically seen on working-class men who did physical labor that involved stripping down when the weather is warm—porters, palanquin carriers, horse groomsmen, firefighters, those kinds of jobs. Firefighters were very likely to have tattoos, often of dragons because they’re water creatures, so it was an implicit prayer that the dragons would rain on the fire. This print from the “Plum” tryptich in “A Contemporary Water Margin” by Utagawa Kunisada I, c. 1859, depicts actor Ichikawa Kodanji IV dressed for the role of Danshichi Kurobei, a fishmonger. ©  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . Collectors Weekly: Were women ever portrayed with large tattoos during this period? Thompson : Somewhat to my surprise, no. I haven’t found any direct evidence of women in the Edo Period, or even in the following Meiji Period, being tattooed. If you look at present-day movies and manga and so on, historical Edo-Period stories often include women with tattoos. But looking at material actually from the period, I can’t find any evidence for women with tattoos. The closest thing I could find was a Meiji triptych that supposedly shows tattooed women, but it’s actually kabuki actors who were all men. My impression is that women were not getting tattoos at that time. I think it was probably around the beginning of the 20th century that women started getting tattoos, although, at that point, it was illegal anyway, so only women in certain underground social circles were doing it. “Zhang Shun, the White Streak in the Waves” from the series “108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. 1827-1830. ©  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . Collectors Weekly: Why was tattooing Japanese citizens made illegal after 1868? Thompson : That was around the time of a major push for modernization in Japan, and it looks as if the Japanese government thought tattoos were old-fashioned and kind of embarrassing. The upper class had never had them anyway, so the people who were running the country probably thought, “Ugh, those working-class men with their tacky tattoos. The foreigners will think we’re all uncivilized!” Something along those lines seems to have been the rationale, though I don’t think there was any official explanation. Collectors Weekly: Did tattoo artists continue practicing after these restrictions were in place? Thompson : Yes, on an underground basis. Despite the fact that Japanese officials restricted tattooing because they were worried about what outsiders would think, real foreigners actually liked the tattoos. Although getting tattooed was illegal for Japanese citizens, tattoo artists were permitted to tattoo foreigners. Many tourists who came to Japan wanted to get tattoos—apparently even royalty like George V of England and Nicholas II of Russia, who received tattoos while in Japan. In port areas like Yokohama, there were legal tattoo shops for foreigners, though I’m sure the same tattooers were doing work on Japanese clients secretly. The restrictions were finally removed in the early 1950s under the American occupation after World War II on grounds of freedom of expression. The argument was that in proper democracies, people should be able to get tattoos if they want. A hand-colored photograph of tattooed Japanese laborers by Felice Beato, circa 1870. Via Wikimedia. ( For more on the emergence of pictorial tattoos in Japan, check out Sarah E. Thompson’s book, “ Tattoos in Japanese Prints .” ) November 10, 2017 at 09:11AM

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Why Mid-Tier Galleries Leave New York

Monya Rowe in St. Augustine Florida

As an artist who moved out of New York City, I’m not alone in finding new energy, inspiration and freedom. My move was from Brooklyn to Asheville, North Carolina. But when I noticed multiple long-established New York galleries also making such moves, it surprised me. Don’t galleries have to stay close to collectors?

According to four dealers I spoke to who had moved out of the city, the cost of operating a gallery in New York City was a major factor for everyone, though lifestyle was also a factor. Says Monya Rowe, of Monya Rowe Gallery “Sadly, NYC is killing itself with all the rent hikes.” Rowe ran a gallery in Williamsburg, Chelsea and the Lower East Side for 12 years before she relocated to St. Augustine Florida in 2015.

If there’s a meta-message here, it’s that the cost of rent for galleries and artists alike is at a crisis level. According to Kristen Dodge, who ran Dodge Gallery in the Lower East Side from 2010 to 2014, and now runs September, in Hudson, New York, this trend may be shifting the kinds of work that can be made in New York, “I don’t know how anyone affords to live in the city. I’m seeing a lot of artists struggling to have studio space – those who are staying in the city are prioritizing networking over art. With the economics of art, and the city where you need to be to network, I’m curious whether art is getting more digital, less materially-based.”

You might expect a New York-griping to follow. But not one gallerist moved because of a dislike of New York. Mostly, they commented on the economic trends of the art world.

Dodge said, “I have no interest in bashing the city [or the people choosing to keep their galleries there] – I respect the people who are making it work. But there is this trend, that as soon as a small gallery becomes successful, they get a bigger space, hire an architect, in order to satisfy the artists whose careers they’ve helped build. I tell you, though, those artists leave anyway. And clients? I don’t know if it changes their collector base. But I’ve seen it [these expansions] at least three times in the last few years, these galleries close.  It sucks.”

Jimi Dams, who has run Envoy Enterprises in the Lower East Side since 2005, is one gallerist who has chosen to close his gallery instead of moving. His feelings on the economic trends in the art world are more dire. “I was director of Feature in ‘97, and we barely broke even. But that wasn’t the goal. Hudson [the deceased owner] wanted to show what he wanted to show, and if it didn’t sell, so be it. It was supposed to do what art should do – broaden people’s perspectives. The others now are showing what everyone else is showing in every museum in the whole world – you go to Paris, Ai Wei Wei, you go to London, Ai Wei Wei. There’s no interest in looking at something else. During the art crash of the 90s, people went and bought a bunch of art for really cheap.” And this, says Dams, was great support for the artists in a hard time, but also great for the collectors – because those artworks appreciated in value and accrued prestige to those collections.

“But in 2008, the collectors all went for the highest – the things that are supposedly ‘certain.’ They are doing what brokers say not to do — buying things at their highest value. They’re not interested in buying things at $300. Now, they just want what everyone else wants, only bigger. It’s the ugliest side of capitalism. It destroys everything creative on every level.”

Tracy Morgan Gallery, An Hoang: Forest for Trees

Tracey Morgan—who worked for Yancey Richardson Gallery, and as an independent art advisor and is now opening a gallery in Asheville—made her move in part to fulfill a dream of opening a traditional brick and mortar space. “I would never even have attempted to open a gallery in NYC. We wouldn’t have had the security, without putting our entire financial future at risk. I’m having to figure out new ways to get an audience. Maybe this is what other galleries in New York are doing. The gallery model isn’t working anymore. Others are doing other stuff – Sasha Wolfe, Andrea Rosen. They’re doing pop ups and art fairs. They still promote their artists, but using a different model. But here I am, with a standard gallery model.”

“I think galleries are adapting to the obstacles that real estate presents,” says Monya Rowe. “I don’t think galleries care as much about being on the ground floor anymore, or having huge spaces, and I don’t think artists are as concerned with this anymore either. People—both dealers and artists—want to collaborate with someone whom they can trust, who puts on good shows and has a good following.”

Clearly, having a good following is key to the success of these galleries. Most of them feel that keeping, growing and expanding their audience is their primary challenge.

For Jeff Bailey, who ran a gallery in Chelsea for 11 years and is now located in Hudson, and Kristen Dodge, the proximity of Hudson to New York City means they can maintain most of their existing ties. And for Monya Rowe and Tracey Morgan, their New York ties are still important.

“I don’t think I would have opened the gallery in Hudson if I hadn’t had the gallery in New York City,” says Jeff Bailey. “Foot traffic alone here is not enough. Building up the audience, expanding on that audience—that is really important.”

All of the dealers moved in part for their own lifestyle, and all chose places with an existing creative community. Says Bailey, “One thing about Hudson, the restaurants make it an interesting place, there’s a music scene here, a lifestyle choice. There’s a creative economy creating opportunities. People come to a place, do the work they do, then more people like them come, allowing galleries with a big city bent to come and have an audience.”

Asheville has an outsized cultural influence for its size – with a music scene, a craft brewery scene, a culinary scene and a longstanding Appalachian maker/DIY/craft culture, which attracted the cutting-edge Black Mountain College in the early 20th century.

And St. Augustine has always been seen as an artsy place in Florida. Says Rowe, “ St. Augustine really embraces its’ “oldest town in the U.S.” charm and many people pass through on vacation or have second homes here. There are a lot of New Yorkers that come into town too.”

Being in a smaller city means, in part, speaking to the location itself – whether by showing local artists, or engaging in local causes. Says Kristen Dodge, “It’s much more community-oriented. Right now I’m co-organizing a Planned Parenthood benefit show with Dawn Breeze of Instar Lodge, and I had a post-election show to benefit Planned Parenthood and the Stanley Keith Social Justice Center. I’m also doing yoga classes.”

This emphasis on sense of place was, ironically, something that gallerist Photios Giovanis hoped to move away from. Giovanis – whose Callicoon Gallery is named for the town in upstate New York where it began in 2009 – chose to move his gallery into New York City in order to step out of a dialog about place. “Ultimately, I couldn’t be part of the whole dynamic conversation happening in New York City. I wanted to be more directly linked to the international world of art, which I ended up participating in. In New York, you’re not expected to talk about the locality. I mean, you can. It’s definitely a place. But there’s a way where major art centers get away with it not having to be about the location.”

For all of the gallerists who relocated, the move is fostering new thinking, new opportunities, new flexibility and the ability to take more risks. “A new location has made me be more open with my gallery choices. Change usually facilitates new thinking, for better or worse,” says Monya Rowe.

Says Bailey, “I think it’s exciting for artists, dealers, art enthusiasts, these days because there can be a really interesting gallery in a different town. There is real community up here. Everything doesn’t happen in NYC, even though it’s where a lot happens.” Bio: Hannah Cole is an artist and Enrolled Agent. She is the founder of Sunlight Tax.

from Art F City http://ift.tt/2sXgXT3 via IFTTT

[tragicbooks]

Bars in Canada are using these artistic drink coasters to fight sexual assault.

<br>

You're at the bar with your friends. Over a couple of cold ones and maybe a handful of peanuts, you talk about sports, politics, and ... consent?

That's exactly what the four women behind Aisle 4, a "curatorial collective" based in Toronto, want to see more of in the world.

Shannon Linde and the other curators work with local artists to create socially-engaged artwork that lives in the real world, not on gallery walls. Finding a way to tackle the topic of women's safety in bars has been on their agenda for a while.

"This has come up quite a bit. I mean, we are four women," Linde says. "People making an effort to change the dangerous climate is not happening as quickly as you would expect."

Aisle 4: Emily Fitzpatrick, Patricia Ritacca, Renée van der Avoird, and Shannon Linde. All photos by Aisle 4, used with permission.

Aisle 4 worked with local artists in Toronto to design a series of eye-catching coasters that would spark conversations in bars around consent, harassment, and assault.

It's no secret any place where lots of alcohol is being consumed can be dangerous. From aggressive, leering Tinder dates, pushy would-be suitors, or even people following them home, women can face an absurd amount of peril for simply wanting to go out and have a drink.

The coaster project, called "On the Table," quietly reminds that "Consent matters" and implores people to "Listen to your gut."

Linde says she knows a coaster isn't going to deter an attacker, for example, but hopefully getting small groups of people talking about the issues openly will have a positive effect.

"A coaster can't change patriarchy but it can remind you that gender is fluid and empathy is imperative." By Hazel Meyer

There's been a bigger push recently to get bar and restaurant staff involved in the fight against harassment.

Plenty of establishments have been in the news lately for adopting "safe words," i.e. a woman can ask for "Angela" or order an "Angel shot" to alert the staff that she needs help.

Critics of these measures say they put the onus on someone to figure their own way out of a dangerous situations, rather than on the people who make them feel unsafe; they also point out that the code words won't do much good once everyone knows what they mean.

On the Table takes a different approach and, quite literally, lays the uncomfortable truth about safety out in the open.

"Consent matters. Listen to her." By Lido Pimienta

"What we're not attempting to do is enact massive social change," Linde says. "Because that's so unrealistic."

She says most of us live in a bit of a bubble, only talking about the important stuff with people we know agree with us. These coasters might be a chance to change that.

"Mostly men are surprised that I might have felt unsafe many times in the past month," she says. "I don't think it's as known what the experience of women is day to day."

"Men are allies." By Jesse Harris

So far, nine bars in the Toronto area have eagerly signed up to use the coasters. More will likely join the effort soon.

The coasters can't be found in the wild just yet (they're currently being printed and will be distributed soon), but Linde says the feedback on the campaign so far has been amazing, and unlike a lot of their work, it has completely transcended the art community.

"This is definitely the most far-reaching project we've done to date," she says.

"Listen to your gut." by Aisha Sasha John

It remains to be seen if the project will have the impact the women at Aisle 4 are hoping for.

But at least they've done their part by creatively trying to further an important conversation. Whether everyone chooses to listen ... that's the bigger question.

<br>

[socialviralnews]

Bars in Canada are using these artistic drink coasters to fight sexual assault.

<br>

You're at the bar with your friends. Over a couple of cold ones and maybe a handful of peanuts, you talk about sports, politics, and ... consent?

That's exactly what the four women behind Aisle 4, a "curatorial collective" based in Toronto, want to see more of in the world.

Shannon Linde and the other curators work with local artists to create socially-engaged artwork that lives in the real world, not on gallery walls. Finding a way to tackle the topic of women's safety in bars has been on their agenda for a while.

"This has come up quite a bit. I mean, we are four women," Linde says. "People making an effort to change the dangerous climate is not happening as quickly as you would expect."

Aisle 4: Emily Fitzpatrick, Patricia Ritacca, Renée van der Avoird, and Shannon Linde. All photos by Aisle 4, used with permission.

Aisle 4 worked with local artists in Toronto to design a series of eye-catching coasters that would spark conversations in bars around consent, harassment, and assault.

It's no secret any place where lots of alcohol is being consumed can be dangerous. From aggressive, leering Tinder dates, pushy would-be suitors, or even people following them home, women can face an absurd amount of peril for simply wanting to go out and have a drink.

The coaster project, called "On the Table," quietly reminds that "Consent matters" and implores people to "Listen to your gut."

Linde says she knows a coaster isn't going to deter an attacker, for example, but hopefully getting small groups of people talking about the issues openly will have a positive effect.

"A coaster can't change patriarchy but it can remind you that gender is fluid and empathy is imperative." By Hazel Meyer

There's been a bigger push recently to get bar and restaurant staff involved in the fight against harassment.

Plenty of establishments have been in the news lately for adopting "safe words," i.e. a woman can ask for "Angela" or order an "Angel shot" to alert the staff that she needs help.

Critics of these measures say they put the onus on someone to figure their own way out of a dangerous situations, rather than on the people who make them feel unsafe; they also point out that the code words won't do much good once everyone knows what they mean.

On the Table takes a different approach and, quite literally, lays the uncomfortable truth about safety out in the open.

"Consent matters. Listen to her." By Lido Pimienta

"What we're not attempting to do is enact massive social change," Linde says. "Because that's so unrealistic."

She says most of us live in a bit of a bubble, only talking about the important stuff with people we know agree with us. These coasters might be a chance to change that.

"Mostly men are surprised that I might have felt unsafe many times in the past month," she says. "I don't think it's as known what the experience of women is day to day."

"Men are allies." By Jesse Harris

So far, nine bars in the Toronto area have eagerly signed up to use the coasters. More will likely join the effort soon.

The coasters can't be found in the wild just yet (they're currently being printed and will be distributed soon), but Linde says the feedback on the campaign so far has been amazing, and unlike a lot of their work, it has completely transcended the art community.

"This is definitely the most far-reaching project we've done to date," she says.

"Listen to your gut." by Aisha Sasha John

It remains to be seen if the project will have the impact the women at Aisle 4 are hoping for.

But at least they've done their part by creatively trying to further an important conversation. Whether everyone chooses to listen ... that's the bigger question.

<br> from Upworthy http://ift.tt/2iQFbFD via cheap web hosting