Artist lecture: Paola Antonelli 4/21/10

Notes from artist lecture featuring Paola Antonelli, an Italian woman curator at the Modern Museum of Art in New York:

*Being a designer and curator can be the same thing.

*The design method can be applied to pretty much anything.

*She couldn’t have been this curator had she not had been taught in architecture.

*Two years of economics; hated it and moved to architecture. Just wanted to be free; not necessarily to become an architect. The path found it self. Keeping her mind open and following the things she liked to do.

*The right direction for her was to become a writer.

*In Italy writers aren’t trained in journalism; they are trained in whatever writing they wish to do, like fiction.

*Worked for Domus magazine that was formed in 1929. Was a housewives magazine. Was at Domus for four years.

*Started coming to America for the Aspen conferences.

*Had landed a teaching position at UCLA and kept traveling between Milan and California. Ended up seeing an ad for a job position at the MoMa in a magazine and got the job. Her job was already set up for her.

*First exhibition she did in ’95 at the MoMa dealt with idea of reality. Wanted to celebrate objects that were made of innovative materials or from old materials in an innovative way.

*Her shows are really relaxed; you can sit down and rest. She tries to make them a much sexier place than any other exhibition around it.

*Her first exhibition you could touch most of the objects. Replicas of objects: one far away and one you could touch.

*Every exhibition is an opportunity to drop into another world.

Thursday entry (for 4/8/10): Survey of highbrows and lowbrows.

Passage from Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life

Tepper, Steven J., and Bill Ivey. Engaging art : the next great transformation of America’s cultural life. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Page 322:

"Although the SPPA survey was not designed to learn what sorts of appeals are likely to motivate greater arts participation, nevertheless it can be used to get a better understanding of the many different kinds of people whoa re good candidates for greater arts participation. This study's primary findings can be summarized in five points.

*Some highbrows, called here highbrow univores, have nearly exclusive tastes for the fine arts, thus fitting the classical stereotype of the highbrow arts patron.

*Many arts participants, called here highbrow omnivores, have a primary orientation to the fine arts but also like a wide range of popular culture offerings. This finding has been substantiated by a large number of recent studies using data from the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and eight European countries (Peterson 2005).

*Looking across all the data collected in the SPPA survey for 2002 on the four tasts groups distinguished as highbrow or lowbrow and univores or omnivores, the level of omnivorousness in tastes is now more important in predicting participation in the arts than is the brow level of taste. This is to say, liking a wide range of types of music is a better predictor of arts participation than is knowing that a person chooses classical music or opera as their favorite kind of music.

*This study's data, as well as that of others, suggest that the more often people go to arts events, the more often they engage in popular culture and civic activities as well. This contradicts the assumption of those arts marketers who see themselves in a zero-sum competition with popular culture and other arts venues. In consequence, it seems that more is to be gained by attracting people to participate in arts events through cross-promotion with other arts and popular culture activities than from fostering competition with them.

*A goodly number of Lowbrows, here called targets, contrary to enduring stereotypes of lowbrows (Bloom 1987; Johnson 2002; Kristol 1978; Levine 1988), say they like fine art music. They are numerous, omnivorous in their tastes, and younger on average than highbrows. What is more, over a quarter already report attending classical music concerts, and over half report hearing or seeing classical music via records, radio, or television. There is not direct information in the survey to test the assertion, but based on the findings of Brown (2002), Walker (2003), and Walker and Scott-Melnky (2002), this study hypothesizes that highbrows are more likely to subscribe to season tickets and annual memberships whereas targets are more likely to buy tickets on an event-by-event basis."

Monday entry (for 4/5/10): Artist of Interest: Liz McGrath

Biography from McGrath's official website:

	Los Angeles-born artist Elizabeth McGrath has always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; this appreciation is nowhere more evident than in her work. Inspired by the relationship between the natural world and the detritus of consumer culture, she brings forth a new cavalcade of creatures from the darker corners of the streets, the city, the imagination. It is this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and suffering specimens of nature that make up her intricate body of work.

McGrath's official website.

Interview with McGrath conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

The following images were found on McGrath's official website.

Schwein Haben, resin, foam, wood, 2008

Muerte & Little Loco, mixed media, tattoos by Morgan Slade, 2008

Mala & Rhea, wood, resin, cloth, tar, 1999

Lion, resin, foam, mixed media, 2008

Thursday entry (for 4/1/10): Aesthetics in the Eye of the Beholder

Passages from Defining Art, Creating the Canon

Crowther, Paul. Defining Art, Creating the Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Page 68:

“Kant observes: ‘We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence.’

Kant’s point here, is that our pleasure in beauty (which he also describes as a mode of ‘pure aesthetic judgment’) is a function of how the object appears to the senses. What kind of thing the object is; its relevance for our practical interests; indeed, whether the object is real or not; are questions which have no necessary bearing on our enjoyment of its mere appearance. Through its rootedness in the immediate sensible particular our pleasure can be characterized as disinterested.

Disinterestedness is, on these terms, a logical characteristic which separates pure aesthetic judgments from those of the agreeable and the good. Pure aesthetic judgments are, in logical terms, indifferent to the real existence of the object.

It is, however, important to be clear about the scope and significance of this claim. In respect of it, Kant has been very badly served by subsequent tradition. As we have already seen in Chapter 1, formalists such as Monroe Beardsley and Clive Bell (and others who I have no previously mentioned, such as Edmund Bullough and Harold Osborne) have, in effect, interpreted the disinterested aspect of aesthetic judgment, as though it were in essence psychological – a kind of detached attitude or mental stance wherein one purges oneself of all considerations deriving from ‘real existence’. Many critics of disinterestedness such as George Dickie, Richard Shusterman, and manifold Marxist and feminists theoreticians, have interpreted it in similar terms.

This has led some of them to the view that there simply ‘aint no such thing’ or, indeed (in the case of Marxists), that the very idea of a detached ‘disinterested’ standpoint, is itself ideologically ‘interested’ to the highest degree.

Now there are elements in Kant – such as his additional characterization of the pure aesthetic judgment as ‘contemplative’ – which lend some weight to this interpretative tradition. These, however, pale into insignificance alongside Kant’s – wholly valid – logic of negation. The key logical significance of the pure aesthetic judgment lies in what it does not presuppose in order to be enjoyed.

To take a pleasure in the way things appear to the sense is just that. We may find that our being in a position to experience such pleasure has required a certain path through life; it may also be that lots of factual knowledge and practical considerations impinge upon our pleasure. However, such factors are not logical preconditions of our enjoying beauty: there are contingent elements. We do not have to take account of them in appreciating formal qualities for their own sake.

On these terms, then, the aesthetic experience of beauty is autonomous in logical terms. This is its definitive trait. However, such experiences occur under historically specific circumstances which means that their significance is mediated. By virtue of both the context in which it occurs and the kind of objects which bear it, beauty can be ethically and politically neutral or rendered negative or positive."

Monday entry (for 3/29/10): Artist of Interest: Nick Walker

Biography from Walker's official website:

In 1992 I began to combine stencils with my freehand work which allowed me to juxtapose almost photographic imagery with the rawness which evolved from conventional graffiti styles.

Stencils introduce an impact element to my work. The appeal of stencils is that they allow me to take an image from anywhere - dissect any part of life - and recreate it on any surface.

I try to add an element of humor or irony to some paintings to add a little light relief to the walls. Painting is a form of escapism for me and if my work allows the spectator to do the same thing, then I've achieved more than I set out to do.

Walker's official website.

Interview with Walker conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

Walker's last solo exhibition was held at the Black Rat Press Gallery in London, England in April 2008.

The following images were found on Juxtapoz.com. Titles and medium of artworks were not available.

Thursday entry (for 3/25/10): Entertainment and Art continued

Passages from Beyond Price

Hutter, Michael, and David Throsby. Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Page 41, essay by Richard Shusterman

“We often speak of the entertainment value of novels, plays, music, and other works of art. But cultural critics just as often contrast art to entertainment, viewing the former as culturally far superior in value. Is entertainment value an important part of art’s value or merely a subordinate, inessential means to conveying that value? Is it perhaps even an unwanted distraction from true artistic value?...Although the precise nature of aesthetic value is unclear and hotly contested, it is generally conceived as an intrinsic rather than an instrumental value. Entertainment, however, seems to imply instrumentality – a means of distracting, amusing, or refreshing oneself, or a way of enjoyably passing one’s time. So besides examining the concept of entertainment, I will also analyze the crucial but problematic notion of intrinsic value. This analysis will enable me to argue that intrinsic value can be reasonably construed in a way that allows a contextual contrast with instrumental value without presuming a radical dichotomy between them that would deny intrinsic value to things that clearly have instrumental value. Being instrumentally effective would not then automatically preclude entertainment value from being also an intrinsic value of art and aesthetic experience and would allow it to be considered a possible constituent of aesthetic value.

One prominent aspect of aesthetic value is its experiential quality. Such value does not lend itself to quantitative calculation or discursive proof but is realized or made evident in direct experience. It is in the experience of an appreciating subject that this value comes to life and is demonstrated; that is why aesthetic value is often described as being subjective in some sense, even when it is argued that such judgments also exhibit some objectivity of consensus and criteria of evaluation. In this sense of experiential value, it does not really make sense to speak of appreciating the aesthetic value of an artwork by merely having read or heard about it but without ever having experienced it, either in its original form or in an adequate reproducing. In the same way, entertainment value needs to be appreciated in direct and personal experience of the artwork enjoyed.

There are also other values that play an important role in evaluation of art, especially whenever we go beyond the specific aesthetic domain to consider the wider field of culture. We sometimes praise (or condemn) an artwork in terms of its social value – its effects in promoting social harmony or social progress. We also speak of the political value of art in similar terms. In the debates over the value of popular art, for example, there are arguments affirming its social and political value in terms of democratic expression, just as there are vehement allegations of its noxious social and political effects in terms of lowering of cultural standards and promotion of an unthinkingly conformist, mass mentality (Shusterman 1992, Ch. 7). Moreover, there are economic valuations of art that relate to sales and profit figures, and those that relate to issues of symbolic capital and status that are more difficult to quantify. To understand or appreciate such values it does not seem necessary to base one’s evaluation on vivid, direct experience of the artwork itself; one can instead concentrate on the work’s effects and relationships in the social, political, or economic fields in which it is situated.

These dimensions of valuing art most aestheticians regard as clearly extrinsic to genuine aesthetic value. But there are two other ways of valuing art that seem closer to the core notion of intrinsic aesthetic value but can still be distinguished form it: art-historical value and artistic value. The first relates to the contribution an artwork or genre has made to art history and cultural history. An artwork that no longer provides rewarding aesthetic experience to many people can still be widely hailed as artistically valuable because it earlier achieved classic status and thus forms an integral, inseparable part of an influential tradition that we still greatly value. The now unappealing classic thus remains highly valued for the still appealing tradition of works that it helped inspire. This value seems clearly relational – a function of the work’s place of role with respect to other works…

To have artistic, as distinguished from art-historical, value, an artwork need not be historically influential; it could simply demonstrate valuable qualities of technique in a given artistic genre. This sense of value hearkens back to the old general meaning of art as a specific skill or craft. A work might be aesthetically disappointing and fail to produce rewarding experience but still have the redeeming value of demonstrating some technical skill in the artistic medium. It is at least artistically valuable to that extent. One can imagine an aesthetically dismal portrait that nonetheless showed technical skill in drawing, or a note-perfect but unexpressive and uninspiring performance of a difficult musical work. If the technical skill demonstrated is innovative or impressive enough to be influential, then such artistic value could also constitute art-historical value. But even if we cannot speak of influence, artistic value seems clearly relational, since excellence of skill or technique make at least implicit reference to standards or paradigms of excellence that lie beyond the artwork itself. This, however, does not entail that artistic value is extrinsic rather than intrinsic, since the value is nonetheless embodied or expressed in the work itself rather than merely its external effects. As with aesthetic value, the proper appreciation of artistic value seems to require a direct experience of the work, though being told that a difficult musical performance was “note-perfect” may perhaps be enough for us to accord it some degree of artistic value without having heard it. Because of this common experiential anchorage (if not also for other reasons), artistic value and aesthetic value are more often run together than distinguished. “

Proof of Anderson Gallery student juried exhibition entry.

Monday entry (for 3/22/10): Artist of interest: Eelus

Biography from Eelus' official website:

Hello, I’m Eelus. People like me because I’m polite and rarely late.

My career as a graphic artist began when I was 10 years old in the ruthless, Thunderdome like playground of a Wigan primary school. Being quite handy with the old pencil, I decided to tool myself up and began knocking out hand drawn posters of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to either A: sell for tuck shop money or B: give away to escape a good kicking due to the shortness of my trousers.

Life continued, my trousers thankfully became longer and the kicking’s subsided, before I knew it 10 years had passed and I was now living in London. Wigan isn’t known for its street art, so when I arrived in London I was excited and inspired by the already booming scene. I bought the countless books, read the expensive imported magazines and after a few years of sitting on the sidelines like the school rugby games 10 years previous, I picked up a scalpel and decided to get involved. Before I knew it I was making a mess on walls as well as knocking out pieces on canvas to A: sell for beer money or B: give away to escape a good kicking due to the longness of my trousers.

In October 2006 I quit my day job and became a graphic artist full time, putting myself on a long road of experimentation, progression, hangovers and worrying about the rent. My goal is to push my limits, learn the skills of my trade and to hopefully continue to make a living from my art. This site is here to document that journey and give you the chance to buy any work I create on the way.

Eelus' official website.

Interview with Eelus conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

Eelus recently had his work shown in his first London debut at Blackall Studios in London, England on February 25, 2010.

The following images were found on Eelus' official website.

Not Everything is so Black and White, spray paint on reclaimed wood

Lung Mixture on Metal, spray paint on vintage metal

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, spray paint on aluminium

I Said I'm Happy (What More Do You Want?), hand screen print on Arches Velin paper

Artist lecture: Megan Biddle 3/12/10

Megan Biddle is a young artist who creates sculptures and dabbles in drawing and film. She graduated from VCU with a MFA in 2005. In 2000 she received her undergrad from RISD. She's received many residencies and awards, the latest in 2009 include Sculpture Space Utica, NY. Artist in Residence, Creative Glass Center of America Millville, NJ. Artist in Residence, Jentel Artist Residency Program Banner, WY. Artist in Residence and The Macdowell Colony Peterborough, NH. Artist in Residence. She's also exhibited her work in several solo and group exhibitions, which include XO Projects Brooklyn NY. Site Specific Installation, The Old American Can Factory Brooklyn, NY. RISD NYC Alumni Biennial 2008, Long Island University Brooklyn, NY. Urban Glass Instructors and A.I.R. Gallery New York, NY. Generations 6.

Biddle gave a lecture in one of the critique rooms of the Fine Arts Building to a small group of students. It felt like a very intimate affair, unlike most of the artist lectures I've since attended here at VCU. Unfortunately, Biddle was a horrible public speaker, found herself unable to play her short films that were embedded into her Powerpoint presentation and rushed through all of her slides. The lecture was over within thirty-five minutes. In her presentation she included random photos of objects she found during her travels that inspired her, which seemed pointless given the fact that they weren't related to any of her completed artworks. I enjoyed a few of her sculptures and installations, including a wall full of melted wax paper that were hung with what appeared to be small rusty nails, but for the most part I felt she seemed more impressive on paper.

Artist lecture: Sanford Biggers 3/11/10

I immensely enjoyed Sanford Biggers' lecture. He was a great public speaker and was not only articulate but charming and witty as well. And he had the artwork to back him up. One piece that he showed that I was fond of the most was his film Small World, which depicted two different films playing side by side. One film was a continuous loop of old home movies shot by a middle class white family in Connecticut in the 1970s while the other film was also a continuous loop of old home movies but shot by a middle class black family in California, also in the 1970s. The home movies of the black family belonged to Biggers while the home movies of the white family belonged to a friend of his. The point of this joint film was to show the similarities, not differences, between the two families of different race across the country during the same time period. Biggers explained that for the installation of the film, the room was adorned with shag carpet and a comfy, worn in couch of the same time period to further escalate the ambiance of the setting and time period within the home movies.

Thursday entry (for 3/11/10): Art museums

Passage from Art in Context.

Fenner, David. Art in Context: Understanding Aesthetic Value. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2008.

“Anyone who has ever visited an art museum knows that all sorts of efforts are taken to provide “proper framing” for enhancing art-appreciation experiences. The paintings are lit well – not too brightly but in such a way that glare is minimized and viewers do not have to strain to see. Natural light is frequently available, but it is diffused. The rays of the sun are not permitted to touch the paintings and other delicate artifacts; if they touch sculptures, they do not linger for long. This is certainly for the continued health of the artworks, but it has the added benefit of providing excellent lighting for viewers: natural light is considered the “truest,” and diffused light eliminates glare. The same is true of temperature. While a constant temperature (and humidity level) is essential to the continued well-being of the artworks, it has the added advantage of providing viewers a level of comfort. This level of comfort allows the viewer to avoid fanning herself or wrapping up tightly in her coat (although many art museums probably require the wearing of sweaters or cardigans). Without having to think about being too hot or too cold, the viewer can direct her attention more fully to the artworks. Art museums are traditionally composed of many rooms. Modestly sized paintings tend to be in modestly sized rooms; very large paintings regularly can be found in larger halls. Rooms have enough artwork to encourage a long stay in each, but the fact that there are more modestly sized rooms than large halls has advantages for viewing. First, the viewer is not overwhelmed by the number of works immediately available; this encourages her to take time with each room and probably added time with particular works in a room. Second, the viewer is not overwhelmed by variety. Most art museum curators group together works from the same period or works that have a similar style or national origin. Not feeling overwhelmed, feeling at ease, allows viewers to linger comfortably, considering the works for as long as the like. The rooms in art museums tend to be painted a netural color, but attention has been given to how the room’s decorations will enhance rather than detract from an art-appreciation experience. Generally speaking, the rule in constructing and decorating an art museum is to provide a venue, a context, that will substantively contribute to the art-appreciation experiences of museum patrons. This usually means that such a venue is grand enough to focus attention away from the cares of the world – the ecclesiastical correlate phrase would be “to provide a sense of the transcendent” – yet simple and neutral enough to focus attention onto the artworks. There are functions to be served in the design of art museum spaces, and what I have written above is only one viewer’s sense of these functions and how they are served. All we really need is the most common sense of what art museums are like to see that such spaces are essentially spaces of decontextualization.

Human beings do little without purpose. Perhaps we do nothing outside of service to some function or other. When we go to the bother – the expense, the care of design – to create an art museum space, we do so very purposefully. We work to create proper framing for art-appreciation experiences, and this proper framing may most succinctly be described as a kind of blank slate – blank not in the sense of being stark but in the sense of directing focus away from itself. Essentially what the art museum designer wishes to do is to provide an uncontextualized space or, if that is a theoretical impossibility, to provide a space where the context is all about pointing to the artworks, the artworks on their own, separate from the cares of the world, separate from their use as instruments of political reform, national pride, social commentary, sexual arousal, psychological exploration, or religious proselytism. Although the contents and styles of individual works may have effects in these categories and others, the art museum spaces in which the works are displayed are generally designed only to point to the works. Whatever viewers take away from these works is their own deal. Art museum designers mean for art museums to be decontextualized spaces. Francis Sparshott writes, “An art museum, like [a] lab, is a carefully neutral environment, with its oatmeal-colored walls…[W]e are not just introduced to paitings in our museum tours, we are introduced to a specific practice of picture seeing.” Kathleen Walsh-Piper, a museum educator, writes, “The very existence of an institution devoted to collecting, preserving, exhibiting, researching, and interpreting works of art demonstrates the concept of “setting aside an object for aesthetic contemplation…The building, whether a grand temple, a spare modern tower, or an intimate historical structure, is frequently designed to encourage a feeling of separateness from the everyday world, a place in which to marvel.”

Monday entry (for 3/8/10): Artist of interest: Ron English

Biography from English's official website:

Ron English is a well-known painter, whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York. Ron is also widely considered to be one of the seminal figures in the ever-growing culture jamming movement. He has pirated over a thousand billboards over the last twenty years, replacing existing advertisements with his own hand-painted subvertisements.

Biography from Wikipedia.org:

Ron English is an American contemporary artist born in 1959 who explores popular brand imagery and advertising. His signature style employs a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, including comic superhero mythology and totems of art history, to create a visual language of evolution. He is also widely considered a seminal figure in the advancement of street art away from traditional wild-style lettering and into clever statement and masterful trompe l’oeil based art. He has created illegal murals and billboards that blend stunning visuals with biting political, consumerist and surrealist statements, hijacking public space worldwide for the sake of art since the 1980s.

Ron English's official website.

Interview with Ron English conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

English's work will be on display May 15-August 22 at the Bristol City Museum in Bristol, England.

The following images were taken from English's official website.

Cowgirl Hat Red Brown, silkscreen on paper, 2006

Marlboro Boy, oil on canvas, 2006

Disco McDonalds, oil on canvas, 2006

Cowgirl Milkshake, oil on canvas, 2006

Thursday entry (for 3/4/10): Entertainment and Art

Passages from Beyond Price

Hutter, Michael, and David Throsby. Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Page 50, essay by Richard Shusterman

“This balanced view of entertainment is decisively disturbed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s influential aesthetics, with its fateful spiritualizing turn toward the ideal. With Hegel, entertainment seems unequivocally identified with what is unworthy of the name of art. In his initial remarks to affirm the worthiness of art in his Vorlesungen uber die Asthetik, Hegel feels he must sharply distinguished between “true art” and the “servile” artistic distractions that are merely “a fleeting game in the service of pleasure and entertainment”…and of other “external” ends of “life-related pleasantness.” Entertainment thus marks the inferior realm of servitude to pleasure and it external ends. In contrast, the fine arts (die schonen Kunste) only become true art (wahrhafte Kunst) when the are free of this subservience. This Hegelian attitude still, sadly, dominates contemporary aesthetics, whose idealist turn has privileged, in the realm of art, truth over beauty and pleasure, while also aesthetically privileging the realm of art high above natural splendors.

Friedrich Nietzsche presents a more complex and salutary view of entertainment and its relationship to art and though. He can deploy the term very pejoratively to denote a trivial concern with shall pleasure and the passing of time to alleviate boredom. On the other hand, in Ecce Homo (“Why I Am So Clever”, Section 3), Nietzsche expresses the positive power of entertainment through the notion of “recreation” (Erholung), which he regards, along with choice of climate and nourishment, as essential to self-care, as what allows him to escape himself and his own self-demanding “seriousness” (Ernst). Nietzsche in fact claims, “Every kind of reading belongs among my recreations.” An intense practitioner of self-meditation like Montaigne, Nietzsche seems to affirm the productive paradox of entertainment’s distraction that we earlier gleaned from etymology and from Montaigne – that the self is sustained and strengthened by being freed from attention to itself, that serious self-care also entails amusing distraction from oneself. And this paradox, I think, implies a further dialectical lesson: that the self is enlarged and improved by forgetting itself and plunging its interest in the wider world.”

Monday entry (for 3/1/10): Artist of interest: Nick Georgiou

Nick Georgiou is an American sculpture who works with the medium of discarded books and newspapers and is inspired by "the death of the printed word/world." In an interview with Juxtapoz magazine, Georgiou explained when he began producing artwork out of paper and why:

During the beginning of this decade –like most people, I saw my entire music and film collection shrink into my computer. I started getting my news online and began interacting with paper in a very different way. Books and newspapers are becoming artifacts of the 21st century. Whatever we used to read off paper, we’re now reading off digital screens. Our way of interacting with text is changing. My work is not only about the decline of the printed word in today’s society but its rebirth as art. I just saw an ad for Amazon’s digital reader, the Kindle, which reminded me of the earlier ipod ads. Instead of "a 1000 songs in your pocket" its “books in 60 seconds.”

Georgiou typically acquires discarded books and newspaper by dumpster diving and is given donations from local bookstores who sponsor him in Tuscon, Arizona where he lives and works. Each sculpture can take anywhere between a few hours to several months to complete since he works on several different pieces at once.

When asked whether he prefers street or gallery exhibitions of his work, he explained,

I don't have a preference. Like with stories, setting - whether interior or exterior is important - and it plays a big factor in the conceptual design of the piece. There's a lot to consider: lighting, backdrop, form. It's all very cinematic. What I like most about street pieces is the element of surprise: you pretty much have no control, there are no clearly defined boundaries, and everyone has access. Gallery shows appeal to me as a sacred space. There's more order, and it's a different kind of cathartic experience because it's enclosed within the confines of space.

Georgiou just opened a new gallery/studio space in downtown Tuscon, Arizona, which has afforded him the opportunity to create artwork while also interacting with the public. He's in the midst of creating a documentary about the decline of the printed word and is working on a series of sculptures for a solo exhibition in Cyprus and Greece.

Georgiou doesn't have an official website but instead has a blog on Blogspot titled My Human Computer.

Interview with Georgiou conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

Georgiou is represented by Andipa Gallery in London, England.

The following images were found on Artnet.com:

Platter, newspaper, 2008

Offering, newspaper, 2008

Kalkl, discarded books and newspapers, 2008

Atlas, newspaper, 2008

Thursday entry (for 2/25/10): Theory of artistic originality.

Passages from Defining Art, Creating the Canon

Crowther, Paul. Defining Art, Creating the Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Page 110-112

“The issue can be focused initially in terms of the distinction often drawn (and also frequently denied) between the products of mass culture and those of ‘high art’.

For present purposes, one could put the problem like this. Kitsch paintings, pop songs, TV soap operas, and the like, are all kinds of image, but the term ‘art’ would seem travestied if applied to them.

The task, then, is to clarify the conditions under which art in the sense of image per se becomes art in the sense of the second normative axis. This means specifically that we must consider the way in which general historical relations mediate the production and reception of art qua aesthetic object. For it is only under such conditions of mediation that the reflective significance of art—its distinctive power of experimental illumination—fully emerges.

In what follows, I will pick up and significantly develop some key aspects of Kant’s theory of fine art (as broached in Chapter 3). I start with the decisive notion of originality.

First, production in all fields of art-making—indeed artifice in general—involves the following of rules. Similar consideration pertaining to methodology, rigour, the gathering of evidence, and verification procedures, also guide the pursuit of forms of knowledge in general.

Now in the case of artifice (in industrialized societies at least) the bulk of production is effected simply by following rules. The criteria of functional efficiency which determine work processes and end products, make the particular identity of the producer into something contingent. Who one is as a person and one’s particular interests, are abilities that may lead to one doing one job rather than another; special aptitudes, indeed, may mean that one does the job rather well; but these personality factors are only significant to the degree that they promote or are conducive to efficiency. They do not figure as a necessary element in either production or end product.

Similar considerations hold (albeit more controversially) in relation to theory or discovery in most forms of knowledge. Odd personality traits, good luck, or untoward conjunctions of circumstance, all play their role in the formulation of theory and the making of discoveries.

In the case of art, in contrast, matters are much more complex. Kitsch works, and most products of mass culture, are produced according to fairly distinct formulae of functional efficiency. Even here, however, the role of individual creativity can be more than simply a contingent one.

The hugely successful TV soap opera Coronation Street, for example, was devised by Tony Warren in 1960. The idea for a drama series based on northern English working-class life, of course, could easily have been devised by someone else; but the possibilities of plot and characterization presented by his original idea—the, as it were, flesh of Coronation Street—are very much a function of Warren’s idiosyncratic original formulation.

In the case of ‘high art’, the role of individual creativity—expressed through style—is utterly and absolutely central, and should be stated in the strongest possible terms. The key concept here is originality. It has two basic dimensions—refinement and innovation. A work which refines is one whose style takes up established motifs and idioms and articulates them to an unprecedented degree of excellence. The innovatory work, in contrast, is, in some respects, unprecedented in the way it departs from existing motifs and idioms, and introduces new ones"

Monday entry (for 2/22/10): Artist of interest: Rockin' Jellybean

Rockin' Jellybean is a Japanese visual artist. His real name is unknown, as well as the year of his birth and no one even knows what he looks like because when he ventures out for exhibitions or is photographed, he's always seen wearing a Mexican wrestling mask. He's commented that he wears a Mexican wrestling mask to make his public appearances funnier because he doesn't ever want to take creating art and being an artist too seriously. What is known about Jellybean is that he was born in Hawaii and lived there during his childhood until moving to Kyoto, Japan. He goes by the name Rockin' Jellybean, which is an alias derived from the nickname Jellybean that his grandmother gave him early on because of the jellybean shaped birth marks he has on his shoulders.

After discovering Playboy magazine while he was in junior high school, he began drawing his own version of gorgeous buxom and often half nude female characters, whose anatomical details were highly exaggerated. Jellybean is considered a low brow artist whose work consist of scandalous gorgeous women frolicking with monsters. He associates himself and his artistic style with the custom car culture of Southern California and with other low brow artists such as Coop, Frank Kozik and Von Franco. He's credited Robert Williams as being a major influence for his artistic style of merging realism with cartoonish undertones. Jellybean doesn't sell any of his original artworks but rather creates screen-prints because he doesn't want strangers to own his original artworks. He's gone on to create Erosty Pop, where he sells retail market items with his artwork printed on them, such as towels, boxers, panties, toys, et cetera. In an interview with Juxtapoz magazine, he explained that he'd "prefer to have my drawings printed on many girls panties, rather than have my prints hanging on someone's house wall."

Rockin' Jellybean's official website.

Interview with Juxtapoz magazine.

The following images were taken from Juztapoz.com. Titles and years were not provided.

Artist lecture: Hank Willis Thomas 2/16/10

I was appreciative that Thomas began his lecture by showing us where he started in his involvement with photography. It's always refreshing to see artists' humble beginnings. At first glance his early photos that incorporated subjects holding an actual frame within the frame came off as amateur but once he explained his concept of showing how much of a lie photography actually is, I warmed up to them.

I enjoyed his projects that dealt with his cousin's murder, especially the series of portraits of people who knew his cousin, but I was also relieved to hear Thomas say that he began collaborating with other artists since he realized he couldn't continue creating art that dealt with his loss since not everyone would be able to empathize. I thought that was very wise of him because he could have easily continued creating projects that dealt with his loss and therefore never grow artistically out of that common theme.

Monday entry (for 2/15/10): Artist of interest: Ben Frost

Ben Frost is an Australian visual artist who was born in Brisbane in 1975. He creates collages that depict the appropriated images of pop culture cartoon characters, such as Hello Kitty, Spongebob Squarepants, Mickey Mouse amongst others, as well as iconic images from advertisement, entertainment and politics. In an interview with Juxtapoz magazine, Frost explained the message behind his work:

It's like that feeling when you first find out that Santa Clause is really your dad dressed up in a costume, or when you see dove droppings drip out of the magician's sleeve as he performs at your 10th birthday party.

Cartoon characters are all happy and fun at first—promising you happy rainbows and pixie dust, but then when you switch off the television, life suddenly isn't like that anymore.

In fact the only way children can feed their rainbow and pixie dust addiction is to get their parents to purchase any number of items from the toy catalogue that the character represents.

New characters are specifically created based on their projected profit margins from merchandising sales, and Happy Meal tie-ins. Their cute happy faces are the public face of the corporations they represent. It is this often-misplaced motivation that casts a dark shadow across the entire idea of children's 'entertainment'.

So I try and imagine what these characters might be doing when they are not working, when they aren't performing for us on our screens. Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar get together and smoke crack, Hello Kitty has a porn addiction, Goofy and Pluto like rough sex with each other, but they always manage to clean up and get it together when they have to come back to perform for the kiddies.

When asked about his usage of appropriated pop culture images and logos, he explained:

A lot of people - and especially a lot of artists, are so incredibly afraid of appropriation as a means of creative representation. There is this scenario in their heads that the 'Coca-Cola' police are going to break down their studio door, dressed from head to toe in red and white leather, tie their hands behind their backs with dynamic ribbon devices and then knee-cap them in the parking lot—all because they painted a Coca-Cola logo on one of their canvases!

Ben Frost's official website.

Frost's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

Interview with Juxtapoz magazine.
The following images were taken from Ben Frost's official website.

Zombie Warhol, acrylic and enamel on board, 2007

Sniff Death/Hang Love, acrylic and enamel on board, 2006

I Drowned Your Fucking Cat, acrylic and enamel on board, year unknown

Gentle Laxettes for all the Family, acrylic and enamel on board, year unknown

Faster Pusycat, Kill! Kill!, acrylic and enamel on board, 2006

Every Man Has His Price, acrylic and enamel on board, 2008

Fantastic Life (as seen on tv), acrylic and enamel on board,

year unknown

Thursday entry (for 2/11/10): Jeff Koons thoughts on his own work and breaking down the meaning of kitsch.

Passages from Terry Barrett’s Why Is That Art?

Barrett, Terry. Why Is That Art? Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Page 27 Koons On His Own Work:

“Koons openly acknowledges his desire for commercial success. He was a highly successful commodities trader on Wall Street, and his monetary gains allowed him to invest in the making of his own art. He promoted himself and his art in full-page ads in art magazines such as Artforum and Art in America, marketing himself in ways similar to executives in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue: ‘I want to be as big an art star as possible. I like the idea of my work selling for a lot of money.’ He compares himself to the Beatles: ‘I’ve made what the Beatles would have made if they had made sculpture. Nobody ever said that the Beatles’ music was not on a high level, but it appealed to a mass audience. That’s what I want to do.’

In response to accusations of cynicism leveled at his work by its critics, Koons adamantly denies any intentional irony in his work, and wishes that it be taken straightforwardly as celebrations of what it depicts. He thinks that Puppy, for instance, ‘is about love’ because for him it is a ‘totally generous piece; it doesn’t segregate.’ He believes that artists can create icons that can ‘reflect the needs of the people, not only in our time, but that they’re chameleon enough to reflect the needs of the people in the future, whatever their needs may be.’

Koons contrasts the liberatory images and sculptures in his ‘Made in Heaven’ series to Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, an early Renaissance painting in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, a painting Koons sees as paradigmatic of suffering and guilt about sex. Koons refutes notions that his works are pornographic: ‘Pornography is alienation. My work has absolutely no vocabulary in alienation. It’s about using sexuality as a tool to communicate.’ Koons intends for ‘Made in Heaven’ to relieve people of guilt and shame. He intends his works to be uplifting.’"

Page 27 Kitsch:

“Gordon Bearn, a contemporary aesthetician, provides examples of kitsch current today:
*Hummel figurines
*Paintings on black velvet of a tearful clown or a beatific Elvis Presley
*Muzak
*Eiffel tower pepper grinders
*Ice cubes shaped like breasts
*Peek-a-boo anything
*Paintings of mournful waifs with the outsized eyes made familiar by Margaret or Walter Keane
*Walt Disney Tudoroid or Bavarioid architecture
*Heart-shaped grave stones
*Plates adorned with cute fluffy kittens
*Some critics provocatively include among examples of kitsch the paintings of Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, the poetry of Robinson Jeffers; some go so far as to proclaim Richard Wagner and Salvador Dali ‘masters’ of kitsch.”

Page 29 Kitsch continued:

“Bearn identifies the philosophical problem of kitsch this way: ‘What does the kitschiness of kitsch consist of?’ Kitschiness is thought to have ‘trashiness,’ but if it does, its trashiness is not due to lack of technical competence in the production of kitsch: Note, for example, the careful skills exemplified in the kitschiest of objects made by Koons. Critics of kitsch generally agree that kitsch and art are significantly difference in quality: Kitsch, in opposition to art, is argued to be nongenuine and inauthentic. Bearn thinks the concept of kitsch is important because by identifying what it is, we can come to a clearer understanding of what art is.”

“More recently, Milan Kundera, in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, writes forcefully about the lies of kitsch: ‘Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.’ Kundera comes to this conclusion, in part, from a theological position. For him, ‘Shit is a more onerous theological problem than evil.’ He argues that since, in Christian anthropology, God invented man in His image, either God has intestines or man is not like Him. Kundera cites the Gnostics’ solution to the ‘damnable dilemma’ when in the second century Valentinus claimed that Jesus ‘ate and drank but did not defecate.’ Kundera continues:
‘Since God gave man freedom, He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man…The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner. It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.’”

“In Bearn’s conclusion about Kundera’s and others’ objections to kitsch, kitsch is harmful because by denying anything that is difficult, kitsch purveys pleasurably sanitized and deceitful representations of the world. Based on what we have of Plato’s writings, it is likely that he would agree with much of the criticism leveled at kitsch, especially its appeal to emotion, general neglect of intellect, and distorted representations."

Monday entry (for 2/8/10): Artist of interest: Niagara

Niagara is a female American artist and musician who was born on August 23, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan. She simply goes by the name Niagara. While studying painting at the University of Michigan in the mid 70s, Niagara formed a punk rock band Destroy All Monsters with Mike Kelly. Niagara was the lead singer but she also created promotional posters and album cover art with the use of pen, ink and gouache. Themes in her art work include sexy femme fatales donned with weapons of various sorts. According to Niagara, “I paint real strong women; a Niagara girls [is] revengeful, but she gets her own way...There’s a lot of crime in my paintings.” Niagara's promoter and body guard has explained that Niagara purposely paints off register "to make it look like a bad silk screen but she does it with such precision, people still think they're done by machine. Warhol would love it."

Niagara's most recent exhibit was held in Sydney and Melbourne in 2008 titled The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful. Outre' Gallery created a set of limited edition Niagara silkscreen prints to coincide with the two sold out shows. In 2007 she created a full clothing line with avant garde couturier Hysteric Glamour to coincide with a show she opened in Tokyo in 2007. And in 2008 she collaborated with Vans footwear, in which she designed seven urban-hip inspired shoes that debuted in Paris.

Here is a snippet of Niagara's biography on her official website:

Whereas her pictorial style and subjects are indebted in part to the pop masters Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Niagara ascribes her most powerful influences to the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau artists Alfons Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley. Her linear technique and application of oriental graphic designs reveal the aesthetic impact of her nineteenth-century predecessors. On her fascination with their predilection for morbid eroticism, she comments “I like all that dark stuff.” Beardsley’s work was characterized by a journalist in 1894 as “the very essence of the decadent fin de siecle.” His images of desire, corruption and death made his conception of “pornotopia” famous among the cultural elite of his day. Now at the close of the millennium, Niagara emerges as the dark angel of decadence whose vision embodies the cynicism that marks the end of our own century.

Interview with Niagara conducted by Pussycat Magazine.

Outre' Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, which held her last exhibition. All of the following images were taken from Outre' Gallery's website.

It's Half-Past Get Out, silkscreen, year unknown

Shut Up or I'll Kill You, silkscreen, year unknown

Think Dirty, silkscreen, year unknown

Run, silkscreen, year unknown

Thursday entry (for 2/4/10): Why kitsch is a threat to high brow.

Passages from Andrew Brighton’s contribution to Contemporary Art and the Home.

Brighton, Andrew, and Colin Painter. Contemporary Art and the Home. New York: Berg, 2002.

Page 246:

“I had a summer job working in an art shop in central London. It sold art materials and a few reproductions. A man came in and asked for a picture with snow-capped mountains. Asking for a painting by subject matter struck me as almost immoral or at least inept, a cross between admitting to a shameful desire and a naïve solecism. I asked by whom did he want the painting. He said he did not know, nor care. He wanted snow-capped mountains. Eventually he explained that he had been on holiday to Switzerland with his wife. He wanted to buy her a memento. I was subsequently to learn that buying paintings to commemorate holidays sustained an economy of small art and craft galleries and local artists in holiday areas such as the Lake District and Cornwall and that images acquired on holidays are a major source of what hangs on people’s domestic walls (see Painter 1986).

I was curious about my surprise at the man’s request, curious about both what it said about my assumptions and what the man’s request revealed. How was one to understand how John Latham’s accumulation of objects placed in a case qualified for inclusion in MoMa, New York, but that a painting of snow-capped mountains was also valued? In other words, what were the assumptions of the art world the man had offended and what was the nature of his culture of pictures. Hand in hand with these questions went the aesthetic, ethical and political question: if they should, why should one of these be valued more than another?”

Page 247:

“Even if the differentiation between high and low culture has supposedly disappeared, in practice the moral and political import of these terms still remains in play. For instance, ‘commodified’, ‘institutionalized’ and ‘fetishized’ are the a priori concepts upon which much current art history builds it’s elaborations. This enemy, this spectre with many names, reappears in the rhetoric of conferring critical value upon an artist. Importance is attributed to artis’ oeuvres by demonstrating their refusal of ‘commodification’, ‘institutionalized’ and ‘fetishizing’."

Page 249:

“One thing I did discover was that artists who had become popular in reproduction were often rather ashamed of it. Further, they often graduated to limited-edition reproductions or abandoned them altogether. Edward Seago, for example, had been a painter popular in reproduction and who had abandoned it long before I did my survey. He was also popular with the English establishment. He was a friend of the Duke of Edinburgh and taught the Prince of Wales watercolour painting […] When I asked popular painters what was the most important attitude painters should bring to their work, the most frequently recurring words were: sincerity, truth, honesty, search and integrity. In their more elaborated statements, these terms spoke for an unsystematic popularism. Honesty resided in truth to one’s familiar culture, sense of self, et cetera. Some made these statements in the context of a rejection of the affected values and pretensions of modern art and fashion.”

Page 251:

“Essential to the way in which art history and the museums institutionalized serious modern art is what they passed over in silence. While art for the middle-class homes and inexpert purchasers is bigger business than art for serious collectors and museums, it has no history, no criticism, and no place in the museum. If it appears in the accounts of modern art, it is as an unexamined spectre of inauthenticity against which authentic art struggles. For example, Norman Rockwell is mentioned in Greenberg’s ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ as a token for all that avant-garde painting is not. Notoriously, the nearest to a reference to a particular ‘kitsch’ painting Greenberg got was to Repin battle paintings. Repin never painted a battle. An unmapped no person’s land appears to exist between serious art and what might be called consensus art. What this hides is how serious art has shaped itself in opposition to consensus art. In the histories of modern culture conflict, we have been told little of the army against which the avant-garde has been deployed.

If taken to be important, Wyeth is particularly dangerous because his work suggests the possibility of serious art outside the art historical map. For instance, in a museum or a history that treats art as a story of historical development, the question of where his work came from and to where it led would be an issue. His technical debt to a tradition of illustration, that of his father, N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle, could lead to the suggestion that they too should become part of the art historical narrative. With these illustrators through the door, would that other absentee from the Whitney, Norman Rockwell, be far behind?

However, the problem with Wyeth is not just with his audience, nor the traditions from which he comes. It is with the nature of his seriousness, it is the ideology of the work. His work is a contradiction, it is serious popular painting and it is populist.

The vast majority of modern painting we know to be most popular through the sale of reproductions realizes the intelligentsia’s nightmare of banality. It is artifacts made, called and treated as art but without any developed discourse or mode of attention that attends to them as art. In such paintings, well-worn conventions evoke familiar emotions and values: the beauties of nature, appealing children, soft erotica and sympathetic animals. This is the art of peripheral vision. The values it celebrates and the emotions it excites are for the most part propagated by other more influential media. Nearly all have overtly painted surfaces, some evoke the style of past high art. There is a more conceptual area of practice, hobbyist art. Here moments of sporting drama and vintage cars, ships, boats, trains, steam engines or birds are depicted for connoisseurs of detail. Precious sentiments and values captured in oils. However, the essential optic of most popular paintings is derived from photography. There mass-media use of photography and the other lens-based means of mechanical representation provide the core of pictorial common sense. We have learnt to dream like films."

Monday entry (for 2/1/10): Artist of interest: Robert Williams

Robert Williams is an American painter, underground cartoonist and creator and editor in chief of Juxtapoz magazine. He helped create what is now known as the low brow art scene, also known as pop surrealism, in the late 1970s. Williams was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 2, 1943. He took classes at the Los Angeles City College school and moved on to a brief stint at The Chouinard Art Institute where he was referred to as an illustrator by his peers, which was meant as an insult. Williams landed his dream job in 1965 working for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, a custom hot-rod builder and artist who created the hot-rod icon Rat Fink. Williams created advertisements and graphics for Roth while working on his own art on the side in the form of oil paintings. Themes in Williams' work consist of hot-rod and underground comic counter culture. After working for Roth, he joined the ZAP Comix collective of artists and helped create what is now known as the low brow/pop surrealist movement along with other artists such as Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and Victor Moscoso. After spending the better part of the late 70s and 80s creating a name for himself via gallery showings and publishing books of his work, which were all celebrated in the underground art and punk rock scene, he created Juxtapoz magazine in 1994. Juxtapoz is now one of the highest circulated art magazines and has launched several artists careers, such as Mark Ryden and Shepard Fairey.

Robert Williams' official website.

Interview with Robert Williams conducted by Sunset Strip.com

Williams is represented by the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York.

Riding a Dead Horse in a Dream Within a Dream, oil on canvas,
year unknown, found on Robert Williams' official website.

The Girl with the Faberge Ass, oil on canvas, year unknown,
found on Robert Williams' official website

The Ball Peen Hammer Expressionist, oil on canvas, year unknown,
found on Robert Williams' official website

Backstage Johnny Expresses His Darker Urges
at the Sight of a Hot Squat, oil on canvas, year unknown,
found on Robert Williams' official website