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